It's Open Access Week, and the University of Minnesota Libraries are celebrating! Events and workshops on open publishing and scholarship are happening all over campus this week—check them out, and find other information on Open Access at the University of Minnesota, at z.umn.edu/oaweek.

Your research data are valuable—and issues of access, preservation, and citation of research data are increasingly gaining attention among scholars. Several federal funding agencies, including the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, require researchers to describe how they will share their data. Learn more about funding agency guidelines.

Making your data open access is one way to manage and share your data! Sharing data can:

• further research and discovery in new ways (e.g., interdisciplinary research),
• increase the impact of your work (e.g., more citations),
• and, if shared in data repositories, preserve and safeguard data for long-term.

Top Ten Ways to Make Your Research Data Open

10. Make data available upon request (e.g., by email).
9. Publish data as a supplement to your journal article in journals that support data supplements.
8. Post data sets to your project web site like the Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve.
7. Publish in a data repository for your discipline, e.g. arXiv, ICPSR and others.
6. Publish in the University's Digital Conservancy like the Department of Aerospace Engineering & Mechanics.
5. Ensure the openness of your shared data with a Creative Commons Zero license.
4. Use proper citation techniques for the data you reference in journal articles.
3. Don't limit data sets to short-term, proprietary formats like Microsoft Excel: Learn more about file formats for long-term access.
2. For private data, use anonymization techniques before sharing.
1. Manage your data throughout the research process.

Open Access Week October 24-30, 2011
http://www.openaccessweek.org/

Our Open Access Week events are free and open to the public. Visit our Events Blog for listings.