Do you know you can make your data open? Why would a person share their data openly? Aside from it being a requirement by some funders or journals, there are many benefits to publishing your data and making it openly available. Publishing can be expensive, and not all organizations, institutions, and researchers can afford access. By making your data openly available, you are also making it more accessible. There are a number of data repositories available to publish your data, and at Dalhousie University, you can use Scholars Portal Dataverse to publish your data for free! There are benefits to openly sharing your data, including supporting reuse, replication, communicating and building on results and more. You can also receive credit by way of citation for your data by publishing in a data repository.
Before you publish your data and share it openly, be sure to check if this is permitted. While many data repositories have features that give you control over access and to create custom terms of use, it is important to understand that not all data can be openly shared. There may be legal, confidential, privacy, security and other limitations as to why data cannot be open. This should be considered in the data management planning process.
For more information, check out Dalhousie University's Research Data Management libguide!
