Data Repositories
Research data repositories help you organize and preserve your data over time, as well as promote the discovery and citation of your data by other researchers.
Funder Requirements for Where to Deposit the Data
The Nelson Memo's guidance unlocks more than $90 billion in research that the U.S. government funds each year by calling on all federal agencies to generate policies that eliminate the current 12-month waiting period for access to the outputs of federally funded research, including articles and data.
In light of this guidance, federal grant agencies have worked with OSTP to update their public access and data sharing plans; for a final deadline of December 31, 2025. Consequently, most grant agencies require a data management plan that describes how research data will be preserved and published.
Public Access Plans and Guidance can be found on Science.gov.
Please view the Federal Public Access Policies for more information about specific agency requirements for data.
Discipline Specific Data Repositories
Many disciplines have repositories set up to host their data such as GenBank, the NIH’s genetic sequence database, or ICPSR, a membership based data archive of research in the social and behavioral sciences. To explore repository options in your discipline, try searching Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data), a global registry of research data repositories across different academic disciplines.
Organize Data Throughout a Project
The Data Management Plan Tool is a resource created by the University of California Curation Center to assist with writing data management plans. It provides templates for many of the grant agencies requiring data management plans and offers examples of plans written by other applicants.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) is an internationally-recognized center of expertise in digital curation with a focus on building capability and skills for research data management. They've put together a number of resources to assist with data management planning.
Persistent Identifiers for Data
Authors are responsible for obtaining DOIs for their own work and for stewardship, maintenance, and updates of the DOI.
There are several Registration Agencies offering DOI assignment and registration, metadata collection, and other specialized maintenance services. Alternatively, some open access repositories and research sharing sites (such as Figshare, ResearchGate, and Open Science Framework) may offer DOI assignment along with other data deposit services at low or no cost to authors.
The Chester Fritz Library will assign DOIs to small datasets deposited in the UND Scholarly Commons at no cost. Costs may vary depending on the repository or registration service you decide to utilize.
If your preferred open repository does not offer DOI assignment services, the DOI Foundation recommends the US-based registration agencies listed below: