Research Guides: Scholarly Communications: Data and data sources

Data sources

Data sharing is increasingly important in research and now often mandated by funding agencies. There are many discipline-specific data repositories, many of which are open access. Learn more about the Open Data movement through SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition. Also, check out our page on library data services to learn more on how W&M librarians can assist with your data for research projects.

Here are some resources for finding open access repositories in which to use or deposit your datasets. Some, such as Dryad, require a fee.:

Data.gov
Find data, tools and resources to conduct research, develop applications, design visualizations and more here through the US federal government.
Dataverse
Dataverse is an open source web application from Harvard to share, preserve, cite, explore, and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others' work more easily. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive academic credit and web visibility.
Dryad
Dryad is a data-sharing intitive that partners with publishers to host research data underlying scientific and medical publications.
Nature Publishing's Recommended Data Repositories
Nature Publishing's Recommended Data Repositories is a list of data repositories evaluated on data access, preservation, and stability.
Open Access Directory of Data Repositories
Open Access Directory of Data Repositories is a listing coordinated by Simmons College of repositories by topic.
re3data.org
The REgistry of REsearch Data REpositories is the largest and most comprehensive registry of research data repositories for sharing and storage of research data. With over 1500 indexed repositories, it's an excellent resource for locating disciplinary/subject specific repositories for finding and sharing datasets.
Root Data Commons
Within the Open Science Data Cloud, the Root Data Commons features a variety of social science, biology, genomics, and general purpose data of interest to the research community. The OSDC has ~1PB of public data in a wide variety of disciplines. These data sets are freely available and can be downloaded over the internet or high performance networks for analysis locally. I

W&M S cholarWorks, William & Mary's institutional repository where data is preserved and accessible through a Digital Object Identifier (DOI).

OA Repostitories

Selected Open Access Repositories

Depositing your work in an open access repository is another way to share your research. Be careful to comply with copyright and licensing restrictions when uploading your published work to one of these repositories.

ArXiv
This open access repository run by Cornell University offers over 1 million e-prints in physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering, systems science, and economics.
BioRxiv
This disciplinary repository operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, is a pre-print archive for the biological sciences. Submissions should be made indirectly via exports from institutional repositories like eCommons.
Cogprints
Cogprints is an open access repository for literature in psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, computer science and numerous other scientific disciplines. Authors can submit preprints or other published works.
OpenDOAR
Directory of Open Access Repositories. This directory provides a searchable database of academic open access repositories. Search either for repositories or for repository content.
PubMed Central
PubMed Central is a full-text, open access database administered by the National Library of Medicine. Authors are required to submit their articles here for research funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

News on big data

Fair Data Principles
One of the grand challenges of data-intensive science is to facilitate knowledge discovery by assisting humans and machines in their discovery of, access to, integration and analysis of, task-appropriate scientific data and their associated algorithms and workflows. Here, we describe FAIR - a set of guiding principles to make data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable. The term FAIR was launched at a Lorentz workshop in 2014, the resulting FAIR principles were published in 2016.

Vines, Tim. Is there a business case for open data? Scholarly Kitchen blog.

GIS Data Sources

The Center for Geospatial Analysis (CGA), located on the 2nd floor of Swem Library, has links to GIS data sources on its website.