Depositing data into ORE

Preparing data for deposit

Before you deposit your research data into ORE, you need to select, prepare, organise, and document your data, check any legal and/or ethical issues, and determine which level of access you will give to your data.

1. Select data to preserve

Not all of the data that you have created and/or collected will need to be preserved. The principle investigator should perform a data appraisal to determine the data that needs to be archived. During this appraisal, think about:

• data that underpin a journal article should be preserved to ensure the integrity and transparency of the research, enabling others to verify or challenge research results.
• data that are unique or contain scientific value and will likely be used for future investigations.
• are there legal requirements to preserve the data?
• should the raw data or processed data be preserved?
• are the codes/software that you used to process the data publicly available?

2. Organise your data

Gather together all of the data selected for preservation. Determine if all of the data will be deposited together in a single folder, or if some of the data need to be deposited separately as they require separate persistent identifiers.

3. Prepare your data

Ensure that the data are in an open format which enables re-use and helps to future-proof them as they will not depend on proprietary software formats which may no longer be supported in the future. The UK Data Service provide a list of recommended file formats.

4. Document and describe your data

Ensure that the data are structured and labelled consistently. Use meaningful file naming conventions and include documentation describing all of the files and how to use them. The documentation should enable anyone to use and understand the data.

5. Legal, ethical, and commercial considerations

Check that you have legal permission to share your data. If your data contains any third-party copyrighted material, you must obtain permission to use and share these materials before depositing to ORE. Additionally, if your data contains any personal or sensitive information, ensure that you have explicit consent to share these data.

6. Access considerations

What level of access will your data require? Will the data be publicly available or will access only be available upon request? How will others be able to use and share your data? Determine how you would like to license your data.

Datasets <2GB

Datasets <2GB in size should be deposited into ORE via Symplectic. To do this you simply need to follow the steps in the Depositing A Dataset Into ORE Guide. Note that the dataset will require a separate Symplectic record to any associated journal article.

Datasets ≥2GB

Datasets ≥2GB in size need to be deposited into ORE using the ORE Deposit Tool, which has an individual file size limit of 500GB. Guidance on using this tool can be found in the ORE Deposit Tool User Guide, but please contact the Research Data Management team in the first instance to discuss your requirements.

When to deposit your data into ORE?

Datasets associated with journal articles should be deposited into ORE once the corresponding article has been accepted for publication. Upon approval into ORE, the dataset will be allocated a DOI, which should be included in a data access statement that should be added to the article prior to publication.