Data repositories
The storage and distribution of research data and publications should use infrastructures that enable open access to, and the long-term preservation of, materials. These services should not result in any unjustified changes in the data, data should not be corrupted or lost during processing, and the accuracy and integrity of data should not be in question. In research data management, quality and accuracy are absolutes that should not be compromised without justificafon.
Such services include the popular PubMed central, ArXiV, Openaire+ and Zenodo services.
Sometimes, your funder or another external party requires you to use a specific repository. If you are free to choose, you may consider the order of preference in the recommendations by OpenAIRE:
- Use an external data archive or repository already established for your research domain to preserve the data according to recognised standards in your discipline.
- If available, use an institutional research data repository, or your research group’s established data management facilities.
- Use a cost-free data repository such as Dataverse, Dryad, figshare or Zenodo.
- Search for other data repositories in re3data. There is no single filter option in re3data covering the FAIR principles, but considering the following filter options will help you to find FAIR-compatible repositories: access categories, data usage licenses, trustworthy data repositories (with a certificate or explicitly adhering to archival standards) and whether a repository gives the data a persistent identifier (PID). Another aspect to consider is whether the repository supports versioning.
You should consider where to deposit and publish your data already in your research data management plan.
Open Science Cloud Infrastructure
The idea of a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) took shape in 2015, as a vision of the European Commission of a large infrastructure to support and develop open science and open innovation in Europe and beyond. The EOSC is projected to become a reality in 2020 and will be Europe’s virtual environment for all researchers to store, manage, analyse and re-use data for research, innovation and educational purposes.
The elements for the success of EOSC are: open, publicly funded and governed, research centric, comprehensive, diverse & distributed, interoperable, service-oriented and social. According to the EOSC strategic implementation plan, the components of EOSC, is to “build the necessary trust for wide deployment among a large variety of research communities, so it is essential that the development of EOSC follows principles that will drive its implementation”.
The EOSC Partnership will enable a trusted, virtual, federated environment in Europe to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines. It will bring together institutional, national and European initiatives and engage all relevant stakeholders to co-design and deploy a European Research Data Commons where data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). This European contribution to a “Web of FAIR Data and Related Services for Science” will enhance the possibilities for researchers to find, share and reuse publications, data and software, leading to new insights and innovations, higher research productivity and improved reproducibility in science.