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What should I share?

A general rule is to publish enough data and documentation so that others can reuse these data for different purposes. It should also be possible to verify the results by reproducing the study’s data processing.

It is important that the data you choose to share are structured and documented in a way that others can understand. 

They should also be available in a file format that is open and/or commonly used within your research field.

It can be valuable to consider, at an early stage of a research project, which materials produced during the research project that may be relevant to share as data. By documenting them well throughout the process, you can save a great deal of time when it is time to share them.

When it is time to share data, whether it is in a repositoryOpens in a new tab or through a data journalOpens in a new tab, it is good to be aware of two commonly used concepts:

Sharing data from different stages of the research project

In some cases, it is important that others can understand the workflows and data processing steps that led to the final research material; for example, if you have cleaned or altered values in a dataset. In such cases, documenting and publishing data from different stages of the project can be beneficial. However, only the most essential steps in the process need to be published. Data from steps that can be easily recreated do not need to be documented as thoroughly.

In many cases, it is neither practical nor desirable to publish data from different stages of a research project. Instead, it is sufficient to make the final version of the project’s data available.

You decide which steps in the research process are worth publishing based on your expertise and knowledge of the data material you have worked with. Keep in mind that what constitutes aggregated data for one researcher may be raw data for another.