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Publish your data

Sharing your data with the scientific community is a milestone for your research, for this reason the best way to share your data and your findings with others is to make them open, transparent and especially interoperable.

If you have followed the previous recommendations up to now, your data should be almost ready to be shared.

The following are the general questions that you should ask yourself when thinking of the legal aspects of sharing your research.

  • Who does own the data generated by my research?
  • What do I need to consider when sharing, publishing and archiving data?
  • How do I handle data with sensitive information?
  • Under which conditions can third-party data be re-used for my research?

Concerning the legal aspects about copyrights and personal data protection, you can refer directly to the official documents:

Links to the official German documents.

Links to the official English translation.

Where to share your data

There are multiple platforms to make your data public, here just a few of the most popular ones:

Sharing code for your publication

If you expect and whish other people to have a more interactive and collaborative approach to the code of your paper, consider to share it also on other platforms such as Github, Gitlab or Bitbucket. Refer to the section about code sharing.

Pre-registration

Pre-registration is a relatively recent approach of doing research, it is based on the assumption that registering in advance, to a dedicated platform, a detailed plan of your experimental and analysis procedures would contribute to a more transparent and reproducible research.

One of the fundamental aspects of pre-registration is a clear distinction between confirmatory-hypothesis and exploratory-hypothesis, or in other words the distinction between the hypothesis put forward before data collection (the prediction) and the exploratory post-hoc hypothesis (the postdiction). Pre-gistration does not favor one or the other hypothesis, it considers both fundamental for the advancement of science, but it requires a net distinction when data and results are published.

For a more comprehensive presentation of pre-registration refer to Nosek et al, 2018.

You can pre-register your research in the center for open science website.

Registered reports

A registered report is an alternative publishing approach that consists of pre-registering and submitting to peer-review a protocol of a study you would like to conduct. This approach aims at enhancing results replicability by ensuring that rigorous methods are followed, that experiments do not suffer from low statistical power and by preventing results selection.

General procedure for registered reports

  • A detailed protocol (including introduction, methods, planned analysis and pilot data) of a study you intend to conduct is submitted to a journal.
  • If the protocol meets the journal criteria it is then submitted to a peer-review process.
  • If reviewers and editors accept your protocol, your study can actually start and it must be conducted by following rigorously the agreed protocol.
  • At this stage your study is in principle accepted for publication, as long as the approved protocol has been strictly followed.
  • The study with a complete manuscript (previous introduction, data analysis and results) plus an additional exploratory analysis section is then resubmitted and goes again through the peer-review process.
  • If the manuscripts is accepted the article is published and data and code are usually made publically available.

Preprints

Preprints are scientific papers that authors make publicly available on dedicated platforms before being peer-reviewed and being published on a canonical scientific journal.

Scope of preprints

Preprints facilitate, broaden and accelerate the dissemination of your research with no costs. A paper can be easily read by everyone, given that preprint platforms are freely accessable, it can be commented, shared and scrutinized by the scientific community and not necessarily by a close circle of researchers interested in your topic, but also by reserchers with different scientific interests and backgrounds. The obvious benefit for the community is the broader circulation of new findings and ideas, the open discussion and for the authors, the opportunity to discuss directly with the community and the chance to identify weak points or mistakes in their paper.

What you need to know about preprints

  • Preprints are not peer-reviewed.
  • Preprints are not edited or typeset before being published on a platform. It is your duty to make sure that the manuscript is in a well edited before submission.
  • Although not peer-reviewed, preprints can be cited by using the digital object identifier (DOI).
  • Revised version of preprints can be uploaded.
  • An article can be posted as a preprint before or during the submission to a scientific journal. It cannot be posted once it has been already accepted for publication by a journal. Keep in mind, that these are general rules, it is advisable to read the journal policy about preprints.

Preprint repositories:

  • PsyArxiv: Dedicated to psychological research (hosted by OSF).
  • BioArxiv: Dedicated to biological research (numerous cogntive neuroscience preprints are published on BioArxiv)
  • ArXiv: Dedicated mainly to mathematics, physics, computer-science, but it can be used in case of methodological papers.
  • f1000: Dedicated to life science research, it allows a public peer-review.
  • Zenodo: Dedicated to multiple disciplines.