Publishing options

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The main reasons to publish data is to share it with others and/or following a requirement from a publisher, funder or your own institution. The specific requirements are covered in the institutional policies and journal policies pages. While these requirements might differ in some details they are all based on the FAIR principles, we can help you making a decision on how to publish your data or code in a way that satisfy these principles. This will depends on the kind of data and the main reason you are publishing it.

 

Where should I publish my data?

There are at least three options and there is not a straight answer, it depends on what you are publishing and why.

 

CLEX Data Collection on NCI

  This is the best option if you have data in NetCDF format and this data could be useful for other researchers. We will help you document your data and make it user friendly; it will be part of a climate data collection and so it will be easier to discover. NCI also has more storage capacity than other repositories and services which are designed around the NetCDF format.

 

Institutional repository

  This is adequate if you have a small dataset and it is really specific to your study or only a subset/post processing of another dataset. While institutions offer some data curation, they usually will not check that the data is well described, consistent and user friendly, so you might get a DOI for your record but no added value. If your dataset is bigger than 50-100 GB you might not be able to publish it with one of these repositories.

 

Zenodo, Figshare, Mendeley

  These services are free, and you can create your own account, a record for your data and get a DOI fairly easily and quickly. You can also publish here different kind of materials. This can be useful if you want to publish some very specific data, for example code and data to produce a specific figure required to publish a paper. 

However, there are nos standars required or anyone checking on your metadata. This means that it is up to you to make sure your data is as FAIR as possible. This means Findable, which is harder when your record is not part of a discipline repository or collection or you haven't used keywords in an effective manner. And Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, which means the data should have enough metadata, use discipline standards and be properly described.

Finally, as for institutional repositories, the data size is limited to 50 GB and you will not get any additional data services apart from HTTP download. If you decide to go this way, please make sure you document your data properly, we are happy to provide support and review your record. If you use Zenodo, you can easily add your record to our Data Collection (see below)

 

CLEX Data Collection

 We have started a CLEX Data Collection in Zenodo to collect in one place all our data records, regardless of how they have been published. Having one place where all our data is listed means that it is easier for anyone to discover CLEX data outputs, both for potential users external to the center and for our own researchers and students. So if you have published your record with your own institution and/or with one of the freely available services, like Zenodo itself, let us know and we will list your data in our collection. We will use your original metadata record and access url as the official source and if a DOI is already available for your data we will list that rather than creating a new one. 

If you're confused feel free to ask us, we are always happy to provide advice and support.

 

Where should I publish my code?

Like data, code represents part of your work and funders are starting to look at all research products not only papers when reviewing grant applications, also some journals require you to publish your code alongside the data. Putting your code on GitHub or another version control service helps to keep track of the code, expose it to others and manage potential issues and enhancements. However, GitHub is not ideal if you want to pinpoint the code you used for a paper or to create some data.

Zenodo is a platform that integrates well with GitHub to allow you to publish automatically every release. Zenodo will keep a snapshot in time of your code and assign a DOI to it. if you are not using GitHub you can simply upload your files directly in Zenodo.

These are the reasons we started a Zenodo community for a CLEX Code Collection (CCC) in 2020. We published there some of our code and code used to produce papers as required by journal editors. We are now looking into broadening this and actively seek contributions of code, notebooks etc that might be useful to others. Zenodo has given our codes much more visibility than GitHub and some of the codes have lots of views and downloads.

 

The diagram below summarise your options:

Publishing options

 

How to publish

 

Reporting to CLEVER

Whichever way you decide to publish your data, as part of the NCI collection or with a repository provided by your institution, remember to add your published record to CLEVER the CLEX reporting hub, in the "Publications and Datasets" section.

You will need to record there only the main information: author, title, doi and citation. It will only take a couple of minutes. Published datasets are part of the Centre KPIs and something we have to report to our funders.