Research data
Funders and publishers increasingly expect supporting data to be made available alongside published papers, to allow verification of findings and to maximise the opportunity for re-use of research materials which are often difficult and expensive to generate. This is reflected in the University’s own Research Data Policy.
There may be reasons why data can’t be shared openly - for example, your data may contain sensitive information about trial participants, confidential information provided by an industrial partner, or you may be using third-party data collected by someone else. If you are unsure whether you’re able to share your data, please contact the Research Data Service for advice: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/staff/researchers/data/contacts/.
What is research data?
Research data is information that is collected or generated in the course of research activities (funded and unfunded), and supports the conclusions you report in your publications. Research data can be physical or digital, and either created in a digital form (born digital) or converted to a digital form (digitised). Software, scripts and code generated in the course of research activities are also considered to be research data if they are required to replicate your findings.
Research data does not include incidental or administrative data generated in the course of research activities, desktop or mailbox backups, or data produced by non-research activities such as University administration or teaching.
FAIR data
The FAIR data principles are a set of guidelines intended to help researchers publish data that can be easily located and re-used by others. There are 14 individual principles covering the following essential areas:
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Findable: indexed in a searchable resource with rich, descriptive metadata and a unique identifier
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Accessible: descriptive information about the data (metadata) is machine-readable and openly accessible even if the actual research data is not (e.g. because it is too sensitive to be shared openly)
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Interoperable: use open file formats, well-known standards and common vocabularies to ensure that secondary researchers can easily make use of data
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Re-usable: data has a clear re-use licence and rich metadata explaining attributes and provenance of data
To maximise the impact of your data, make sure that the method you choose to publish it follows the FAIR principles.
Choosing a data publication method
There are a number of different ways of publishing your data; as a general rule, you can use any of the methods listed below, or more than one, providing the access level offered is appropriate to the sensitivity of your data.
| Data publication method | Benefits | Disadvantages |
|---|---|---|
| Disciplinary data repository (e.g. UK Data Service) |
Long term storage May offer safeguards to allow sharing of sensitive or identifiable data |
May require significant work to prepare data for deposit |
|
University of Bristol research data repository |
Long term storage Offers safeguards to allow sharing of sensitive or identifiable data |
Data may be less visible than in a disciplinary repository |
|
Commercial data repository |
Easy |
Not suitable for sensitive data requiring access restrictions |
| Supplementary information alongside paper |
Integrated into manuscript submission process |
Not suitable for sensitive data requiring access restrictions |