Why share research data?
Research information belongs to everybody. Research information contains both research publications and data. Open science benefits individual researchers, science communities, funders as well as the entire society.
Benefits for the researcher
Benefits for the scientific community
Benefits for funders
High-quality metadata is like a business card for research and the researcher. It improves the the data’s discoverability via search engines. Metadata always contains the data's
Metadata can also include explanations of code, information on data analysis as well as on the research project and producers of the data. There are several different standards for metadata, depending on the file format and field of research:
Tools for creating and managing metadata:
More information can also be found in the Finnish Social Science Data Archive Handbook and in the university of Helsinki's guide "Making a research project understandable". MIT Libraries has also collected instructions on creating metadata.
Research data or metadata can be published in different ways:
Finnish funders
International funders
Open notebook science means that a research project is made public already when it is being conducted. Open research or laboratory notebooks detail the different phases of data collection, measurements etc. The goal is to ensure the transparency of research.
Ordinary web sites or different kinds of social media services can be used as practical tools. Documents can be shared in different cloud services, e.g. with Seafile cloud service. Instructions available on the IT Services of the University of Turku.