The benefits of sharing your data in a repository

Access to raw scientific data enhances understanding, enables replication and reanalysis, and increases trust in published research. 

The vitality and utility of research data has made Open Data a central tenet of Open Science, second only to publishing under an Open Access license. For that reason, governments, funders, and publishers increasingly recommend or even require data sharing, and readers have come to view Open Data as a hallmark of quality research. 

Purpose-built data repositories are the most effective, stable, and discoverable way to share research data—which means more attention and impact for research. In fact, articles that link to data in a repository have a 25% higher citation rate than articles that do not share data, or share only in Supporting Information files.

Repositories also make it easier to claim academic credit for data collection and curation, by assigning a unique identifier, like a DOI, and enabling authors to link their ORCID.

What this short video on the benefits of data sharing and repository use to learn more.

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Advice from the experts

“Whether I’m using my own data or someone else’s, having access to the data in a repository means that I know which version to use and refer to. This has been really useful as I don’t waste time looking through files and folders on my own computer as I can just click on the DOI and go straight to the data. This also means I don’t have to bother anyone else to get the data or spend time magnifying graphs and approximating the values of the data points in order to reuse someone else’s findings (yes I really did this with an article published back in the 1980s!)”

Lauren Cadwallader, PLOS Open Research Manager

Coming up

Watch this space for more tips and advice for successful data sharing!