Skip to Main Content

Research Data Support Services for Researchers

Mae'r dudalen hon hefyd ar gael yn Gymraeg

Archiving Research Data

What to Keep?

The DCC provides comprehensive guidance to help researchers assess what data to keep

Where to archive research data

There is no easy answer to this! General advice suggests to first check any funder guidance, then any well established subject or community repository options, otherwise use Swansea University’s data storage solution (see below).

Some funders mandate their own repositories for research data:

  • The ESRC have the UK Data Archive
  • NERC advice on data repositories
  • Wellcome Open Research list of approved data repositories
  • BBSRC resources

General lists of data repositories that can be browsed by subject

  • re3data.org (all subjects)
  • FAIRsharing.org (resources for all subjects)

The DCC has a “Where to keep research data checklist” which looks at how to approach the following questions:

  1. is it a reputable repository available?
  2. will it take the data you want to deposit?
  3. will it be safe in legal terms?
  4. will the repository sustain the data value?
  5. will it support analysis and track data usage?”

Resources

Swansea University’s Open Research Data Community

If no suitable subject or funder data repository is available, Swansea University has an open research data community on the Zenodo service. This service is run by CERN who are expert at dealing with large datasets and guarantee to migrate the service to other repositories if it discontinued so it is robust enough to satisfy funder requirements. It will also provide a DOI for your data so that it is easier to find and promote.

Zenodo can store files of up to 2GB and offers a variety of licences. When choosing a licence you need to consider funder requirements and also whether there is any need for confidentiality in your research (see further: Sharing & Reusing Data). Although Zenodo encourages open data you do not have to make everything open.

Please note that while the university encourages the use of Zenodo for data, the full text of publications should always be deposited in the Research Information System.