Where to share your data

Research funders often require grant recipients to use their own funder specific repositories, whilst publishers may ask submitting authors to use a specific data service. Researchers may want to use subject specific repositories, as this can guarantee their research outputs are visible to a particular research community. 

Open University Insititutional Repository

You can share you data in the University's own research data repository, Open Research Data Online (ORDO). Advice on using ORDO is available on the Uploading your data page on this site.

External Repositories

The Digital Curation Centre has published a checklist for evaluating data repositories which will help you to evaluate the quality of services provided by data repositories. External data repositories will often provide specialist assistance with the preparation of your data for deposit.

Funder repositories

Here are some of the main funder repositories:

• UK Data Service ReShare – funded by ESRC but will accept any research data which fulfils their Collection Policy (pdf)
• NERC Data Centres - NERC has a network of environmental data centres that provide a focal point for NERC's scientific data and information. These centres hold data from environmental scientists working in the UK and around the world. The data centres are responsible for maintaining environmental data and making them available to all users, not just NERC researchers but others from science, commerce, government and education as well as the general public
• STFC Data Centres - several data centres, services and research portals are in place, such as the UK Solar System Data Centre and the Physical Sciences Data-Science Service.These are generally organised on a subject basis rather than serving the outputs of the whole council, and deposit is not mandated

Online services

There are an increasing number of online repositories for sharing your research data. This is a selection of the most popular ones.

• Figshare – an online repository which allows researchers to upload and share their research data. It is free to upload unlimited public data. With in-browser visualisation and automatically assigned DOIs, this service is gaining in popularity with researchers from a range of academic disciplines
• Zenodo - this free online repository was developed by CERN as part of the EU OpenAIRE project and is aimed at the long-tail of science. There is a maximum threshold for upload of 50GB per file and you are able to include multiple files in one dataset or collection
• CKAN datahub – a free online repository for publishing datasets, managed by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKFN)
• Dryad - Dryad hosts research data underlying scientific and medical publications free of charge. Most data in the repository are associated with peer-reviewed journal articles, but data associated with non-peer reviewed publications from other reputable sources (such as dissertations) are also accepted

Data repository directory

• Re3data is a global registry of data repositories. Repositories are listed according to subject, data type and country.