The benefits and reasons for making data discoverable are:
There are instances where data cannot be shared or may first need to be de-identified:
Sharing data on a platform like Figshare also increases your citations and broadens the impact of your research, as proven by a recent article published in the Public Library of Open Science. In this below quotation DAS stands for "Data Availability Statement" - the author's statement about where the data supporting an article's findings can be accessed, with 3 being the most open and easily available. As the paper states:
"The results of citation prediction clearly associates a citation advantage, of up to 25.36%, with articles that have a category 3 DAS—those including a link to a repository via a URL or other permanent identifier, consistent with the results of previous smaller, more focused studies [...] Sharing data also gives more credibility to an article’s results, as it supports reproducibility. Finally, data sharing encourages re-use, which further contributes to citation counts."
Source: Colavizza G, Hrynaszkiewicz I, Staden I, Whitaker K, McGillivray B (2020) The citation advantage of linking publications to research data. PLoS ONE,15(4): e0230416. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0230416
Stories that show research data impact
The #dataimpact eBook brings together 16 of the stories collected during the #dataimpact campaign.
The stories showcase the real-life impact of Australian research data.
Read online the book from the Australian National Data Service (ANDS).
Figshare is a best-in-class data publishing platform for RMIT researchers and Higher Degree Researchers to manage and discover research. It is a free and easy solution to store and share research data with the global community, supporting over 1,200 file types, and allowing researchers to mint their own DOIs, helping track research impact and promote their work.
See the Figshare page for institutional access, user guides and tutorials, and more.
For Figshare support, please contact an RMIT data librarian, email: research.data@rmit.edu.au
Digital Object Identifiers, or DOIs, can be applied to datasets hosted on openly accessible platforms or on data held securely.
RMIT staff and students can obtain a DOI using Figshare, the university's data repository, which allows each user to mint as many DOIs as needed for individual datasets or for larger collections of bundled datasets.
See the Figshare page for institutional access, user guides and tutorials, and more.
For Figshare support, please contact an RMIT data librarian, email: research.data@rmit.edu.au
For information on citing or referencing data see the following guide:
Figshare's annual State of Open Data 2022, in collaboration with Digital Science and Springer Nature, has been released. You can find the full report here.
Based on a global survey, the report is now in its seventh year and provides insights into researchers’ attitudes towards and experiences of open data. With more than 5,400 respondents, the 2022 survey is the largest since the COVID-19 pandemic began.
This year’s report includes guest articles from open data experts at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), publishers and universities.