Publishing research data

An appropriate publication of research data offers advantages in terms of verification of scientific results, citability, citation frequency as well as data reuse.

The importance of research data is underlined by scientific organisations at national and international level in various statements and recommendations. For example, both the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the European Union (EU) aim to ensure that data generated in the course of research projects and their documentation are published wherever possible.

Publishing in PUBLISSO – Repository for Life Sciences (FRL)

Digital research data, arising separately, as well as in combination with scientific publications, can be listed and published free of charge up to 1 terabyte in our repository. An exception is data with personal reference, which is protected by data privacy.

When publishing your research data, it is important to document them with a detailed description to ensure that they can be clearly interpreted and reused in the future. This description is created in the form of metadata, which can also be supplemented by any accompanying materials, such as descriptions of methods, project reports, readme files, computational codes or questionnaires.

PUBLISSO offers a number of ways of publishing research data. We would be happy to advise you on this.
 

How to proceed: 

If you decide to deposit your research data in the FRL, we will provide you with a form to enter your metadata. At least the following questions have to be answered:

• What is the title of the research data publication?
• Who is/are the author(s) of the publication?
• If there is no specific author: what is the name of the entity that is publishing the data?
• In which year was the data generated?
• What media contains the data (images, videos, software, etc.)?
• In which file formats and size are the research data available (CSV, TIFF etc.)?
• Will access to the publication be embargoed? In this case the metadata will be published first and the data at a later date (maximum after 24 months).
• What type of reuse licence will be assigned to the data?
• How can the published data be defined in a comprehensible way?
• Which subject area should the research data be assigned to?
• What language is the data in?

We are happy to help you answer these questions.

Once we receive your filled in form, we check the metadata for completeness and plausibility, and assign a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to the metadata entry in the FRL. This DOI makes your data referenceable and permanently findable. Afterwards the submitted data and accompanying material is checked to ensure copyright, data protection, proper documentation, and – as far as accessible by ZB MED – the technical reusability and integrity of the data. If this  is confirmed, we will add everything provided to the metadata record already created in the FRL.

The terms of publication in the PUBLISSO – Repository for Life Sciences are governed by our publication directives („Policy“) as well as a signed cooperation agreement for institutions, or alternatively the terms of use (“Nutzungsvereinbarung”). The purpose of these directives and agreements is to protect the rights and obligations of the authors and ZB MED. 

All publications in the FRL can be found in LIVIVO – the ZB MED search portal and Europe's largest search engine for the life sciences – as well as via BASE and DataCite. The FRL itself is listed in re3data.org (Registry of Research Data Repositories).