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Sharing Your Data: A Primer

Howdy.

VIDEO: Data Sharing and Management Snafu in 3 Short Acts, NYU Health Sciences Libraries (4:40 mins)

Take a few minutes to watch the video linked above. Were you able to relate to the story?

A key component of making your data open is sharing it. Historically, because of technological constraints, all the information shared from a research project was published in written summary form, whether it was a book, an article, or a thesis. Unfortunately, these written summaries inherently leave out many of the details of the scientific process. Thankfully, in recent years there has been a shift in that thinking and the idea that the research data can be just as important as, if not more than, the resulting publication. Similarly, we’ve been seeing a shift around the release of government data, on the local level as well as federal.

We have seen this shift taking place through changes in funder policies, government initiatives, and the development of institutional, national, disciplinary, and other types of data repositories to host data.

Sharing your data requires more than just saving your data to a publicly available website. In previous primers we’ve discussed why and how to make your data reusable. In this primer, we’ll show you how to share that reusable data.