Research Guides: Data Repositories: Data repositories

Contacts

Sue O'Dell, Science Librarian, sodell@bowdoin.edu, 207-725-3265

What is a Data Repository?

"A data repository can be defined as a place that holds data, makes data available to use, and organizes data in a logical manner. A data repository may also be defined as an appropriate, subject-specific location where researchers can submit their data. Data repositories may have specific requirements concerning subject or research domain; data re-use and access; file format and data structure; and the types of metadata that can be used. Librarians can assist researchers in finding a data repository by evaluating and recommending subject-specific repositories that would be best suited to hold or find and use biomedical research data. Many data repositories have restrictions on who can deposit data into them based on funding, academic qualification, and quality of data. There are, however, a number of data repositories that are classified as "open"; and as a result are essentially open to receiving data from anyone." (Source: e-Science Portal for New England Librarians)

Repository Registries and Lists

OpenDOAR
"A global directory of Open Access repositories and their policies."
re3data.org
"re3data.org helps researchers to find appropriate repositories for the storage and access of research data." It "is a global registry of research data repositories that covers research data repositories from different academic disciplines. It presents repositories for the permanent storage and access of data sets to researchers, funding bodies, publishers and scholarly institutions."
Community Owned digital Preservation Tool Registry (COPTR)
"COPTR describes tools useful for long term digital presesrvation and acts primarily as a finding and evaluation tool to help practitioners find the tools they need to preserve digital data." Begin with Store.

Institutional Repository

Bowdoin Digital Commons
"The Bowdoin Digital Commons advances scholarship and encourages the growth of scholarly communities through free access, quick discovery, and wide dissemination of digitally published content created by the College’s faculty, students, and administration. By offering a shared venue for the results of original research, literary and artistic expression, teaching and learning, as well as for select College publications, the Bowdoin Digital Commons supports scholarly communications that reach across the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines."

General Multidisciplinary Repositories

Datahub
Publish or register datasets, create and manage groups and communities.
Harvard Dataverse
"The Dataverse is an open source web application to share, preserve, cite, explore and analyze research data. It facilitates making data available to others, and allows you to replicate others work. Researchers, data authors, publishers, data distributors, and affiliated institutions all receive appropriate credit. A Dataverse repository hosts multiple dataverses. Each dataverse contains datatset or other dataverses, and each dataset contains descriptive metadata and data files (including documentation and code that accompany the data)."
Zenodo
ZENODO is a CERN Data Centre-backed research data repository for the long-tail of science, enabling researchers to preserve and share their research output from any science, regardless of the size and format. ZENODO is an innovative and easy to use web-platform, which allows for upload, curation and sharing of the research data through an easy to use web interface and integration with other collaboration and data sharing services. ZENODO ensures the discovery and citability of the research output by assigning a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to every upload, as well as promotes software citation and preservation through one-click integration with GitHub.

General Science Repositories

Dryad Digital Repository
The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes.
Forest Service Research Data Archive
Data from research in forest and grassland ecosystems that span a diverse set of disciplines ranging from silviculture and hydrology to social science and wildlife management.

Environmental Data Repositories

Knowledge Network for Biocomplexity (KNB)
An international repository intended to facilitate ecological and environmental research
DataONE
Data Observation Network for Earth (DataONE) is the foundation of new innovative environmental science through a distributed framework and sustainable cyberinfrastructure that meets the needs of science and society for open, persistent, robust, and secure access to well-described and easily discovered Earth observational data.

Earth and Oceanographic Sciences

EarthChem
EarthChem develops and maintains databases, software, and services that support the preservation, discovery, access and analysis of geochemical data, and facilitate their integration with the broad array of other available earth science parameters.
Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance (IEDA)
IEDA or Interdisciplinary Earth Data Alliance is a community-based data facility funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) to support, sustain, and advance the geosciences by providing data services for observational solid earth data from the Ocean, Earth, and Polar Sciences.
Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS)
IRIS provides management of, and access to, observed and derived data for the global earth science community.
more...less...
This includes ground motion, atmospheric, infrasonic, hydrological, and hydroacoustic data.

Biological, Biochemical and Medical Data Repositories

National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)
The National Center for Biotechnology Information advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information.

Chemistry Data Repositories

Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre (CSD)
Established in 1965, the CSD is the world’s repository for small-molecule organic and metal-organic crystal structures.
more...less...
The CSD also contains directly deposited data that are not available anywhere else.

Humanities Repositories

Social Science Repositories

ICPSR
ICPSR (Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research) maintains a data archive of more than 500,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 16 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields. Commonly used datasets include General Social Survey, American National Election Study, National Election Study, U.S. Census, etc. ICPSR contact: Erin Valentino, evalenti@bowdoin.edu. Dates of Coverage: NA.
openICPSR
Store social and behavioral science research data and make it freely available. Preservation and curation services available for a fee.

General Data Repositories

Kaggle
Kaggle supports a variety of dataset publication formats, but strongly encourage dataset publishers to share their data in an accessible, non-proprietary format if possible. Not only are open, accessible data formats better supported on the platform, they are also easier to work with for more people regardless of their tools.