5.2 Data Repositories

As mentioned earlier, there may be data repositories suitable for the data that your project will produce. To find such repositories, you may wish to consult Databib [1] - a growing list of repositories for research data primarily in the sciences and social sciences. Data sets stored in a disciplinary repository have some advantages, including a greater likelihood of discovery by other researchers. Another benefit to researchers in having your data made available in a repository is that it is more widely accessible and citable. Andrew Stephenson attests to the advantages of data repositories in the following video.

Link to YouTube video. [2]

Examples of disciplinary data repositories:

Dryad [3] - for data sets in the applied biological sciences that are linked to published articles
ChemxSeer [4] - for chemistry data sets
ESA (Ecological Society of America) Data Registry [5] - for data sets in ecology
ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research) [6] - for social sciences data
IEDA (Integrated Earth Data Applications) [7] - for “observational solid earth data from the Ocean, Earth, and Polar Sciences”

For help in selecting the appropriate data repository for your data, consult the Libraries’ Data Management mailing list, l-data-mgmt@lists.psu.edu [8].