Publishing your data in Yoda

Publishing your data is part of making your data FAIR. It is a great way to increase the visibility of your work and can allow others to reproduce and reuse your data.

In Yoda, it is possible to publish both the metadata and the contents of the data package (Open), or to only publish the metadata of the data package (Restricted). The latter option may be useful when your data package contains personal data, or data that is protected by intellectual property rights, for example. Publishing the metadata will make sure that others can find your data package and can understand if and how they can request access to your data package.

Publishing sensitive data

If your data package contains sensitive data, such as personal data, or data are someone else’s intellectual property, it may not be possible or allowed to make these data publicly available. With Yoda, you can choose to:

• Remove the sensitive information from the data package. For example, anonymizing personal data, or splitting up the data package into a folder with the not-to-be-shared data and files that can be published openly (such as the documentation).

• Choose a restricted or closed access level in Yoda:

  • Open: both the metadata and the data package’s contents will be published.

  • Restricted: the metadata will be published, the data package’s contents will be available on request.

  • Closed: the metadata will be published, but the data is not available for sharing. 

Note that for the second option, you must add a custom License.txt file to your data package that specifies the conditions for accessing the data package.

How to publish data in Yoda

1. Make sure your data package is archived. You can only publish archived data packages, and the archived data package will be published as a whole. If you want to publish subfolders, you should archive the subfolders separately first.
2. In the Yoda web portal, navigate to the Vault to find the archived folder that you want to publish.
3. Under ‘Actions’, click ‘Submit for publication’.  

4. Select if the data package is a new publication, or whether the data package is a new version of an already published data package.

When you link your data package to an existing publication, Yoda will assign the same base DOI to the data package, and register the new data package as a new version of the earlier data package. Here you can find an example of linked data packages.

5. You will then see a screen with a publication agreement, asking if you are certain that you want to publish the data package. Tick the box to agree with the statements in the agreement and click ‘Confirm agreement’.

Once the data package has been submitted for publication, the data manager will receive a notification and will evaluate the data package on criteria like the structure and documentation, compliance with policies and regulations, and completeness of the metadata. After this review, the data manager will either approve the publication, or ask you to make some additional changes to make the data package more FAIR.

Upon publication of a data package

When the data package has been published, the following will happen:

• A public landing page will be created for the data package with all the Yoda metadata. The metadata will also be registered in DataCite, which allows the data package to be easily findable for others on the internet. 
• A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) will be assigned to the data package. You can use the DOI to cite the data package, for example in your manuscript, to register it in Pure, or to promote it via social media. You can find the DOI by clicking the “i” icon in the Yoda vault once the data package is published.

• If the Access level in the metadata form was set to “Open - Freely retrievable”, the files in the data package will be publicly available for download from this landing page. If the Access level was set to “Restricted” or “Closed”, only the metadata for the data package will be publicly available.

Un-publishing a data package

Publishing your data package is an important step, just like the publication of a journal article or book chapter. Before you publish your data package, you must make sure that it is correct, well-structured, and well-described. Once published, the data package will be findable (and potentially accessible) for anyone on the internet by its DOI. Only in exceptional cases will a data package be un-published, and its landing page will then have to explain why it is not available anymore. In general, you should assume that once your data package is published, it will remain published and be part of the academic record. If you have a good reason to un-publish your data package, please contact your data manager.