Publishing your data

Once your research project is finished, you may want to publish your research data. Publishing data expands your visibility in your scientific domain and helps to increase the reuse of your data. You can publish data at any moment, whether you want to wait until your manuscript is accepted for publication by a journal or earlier. You can publish data only after you have archived it.

Follow these steps to publish data:

1) You must publish your data through the website portal. Publishing is not possible through the network drive. Log in to your research environment.

2) Click on 'Research' in the menu (the black bar).

3) Go to the data package in the vault that you wish to publish.

You can search for archived, unpublished data using the 'Search by Status' function. You will only see the list of data packages from research groups of which you are a member.

4) Select the data package you want to publish and make sure that all metadata has been entered and is in a well-defined structure. When you have determined that this is the data package you want to publish, click on ‘Submit for publication’.

5) Once you have submitted a data package for publication, the data manager will check if it meets the various criteria for publication. Your data manager can inform you about these criteria.

If there are any issues, the data manager will contact you. If your data is ready for publication according to the data manager, you will receive an email notification. It says that your data package has been published.

6) When your data has been published, this is what happens: 

• A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is assigned to the data package. This persistent identifier can be used to refer to the data package, e.g. in a scientific publication. You will receive an email containing the DOI when the publication is approved. Alternatively, you can look up the DOI by clicking on the information ("i") icon of the data package after it has been approved and published. 
• The metadata of the data package will be published in data catalogues, such as Datacite and the Netherlands Research Portal.
• If the Access Type metadata field is set to 'Open - Freely retrievable', the data will be published as well. If the Access Type metadata field is set to 'Restricted' or 'Closed', only the metadata for the data set will be publicly available (recommended for sensitive data).