A data repository is a place where research data and other academic outputs can be stored and described, and which are designed to guarantee long-term accessibility of the data. Digital objects stored in repositories are given a Persistent Identifier (PID), making your data findable and citable.
Data in repositories can be shared openly or selectively depending on your data’s legal requirements (e.g. patient data). In general, the motto for data sharing is “As open as possible, as closed as necessary”.
Repositories and FAIRness
By submitting your research data to repositories, you make your work more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). Submitting to repositories provides many benefits to you as a researcher, such as:
- Your work is assigned a persistent identifier (e.g. a DOI), enabling others to easily cite and share your work.
- Standardized metadata describing your data increases machine-readability and findability (e.g. via search engines).
- You attach a license to your data, describing how others are allowed to reuse your work.
- You have a long-term reliable backup of your data.
- You comply with University of Freiburg’s Research Data Management Policy and Open Science Policy.
Choosing a repository
There are many data repositories available. You can find repositories via registries such as
Selecting the best repository for you data can be a bit of a challenge. Below is the order of preference for selecting a repository to help you decide the best repository for your use case:
- A well-established repository in your discipline offering a specific scope (e.g. specializing in your type of data or supporting a specific metadata schema).
- One of the repositories recommended by your funding agency.
- Your institution’s repository (e.g. FreiDOK+ or FreiDATA for the University of Freiburg)
- A cost-free general-purpose repository (e.g. Zenodo).
- Another repository that you identified via the above-mentioned repository registries.