Preserving your research data and materials ensures that the data underpinning your published research outputs can be maintained long-term, and found and reused in the future. Many research funders and publishers also expect that the research data underpinning research outputs are made available as openly as possible.
Quick links within this section:
- How to select and prepare data for preservation and publication
- How to choose and use a research data repository
- How to restrict access to data
- How to create a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) in the Virtual Research Environment
- How to write a data access statement
- How to publish your data
Benefits of preserving and sharing research data
- Preserving and sharing or publishing your research data facilitates the ongoing accuracy, authenticity, reproducibility, and integrity of your research.
- Preserving your data in a repository safeguards it against loss, deterioration, unauthorised or inappropriate access, obsolescence and future incompatibility, and ensures that you can still access your data if you move institutions.
- Preserving your data can be used to demonstrate compliance, either with national legislation (such as the Freedom of Information Act 2000 or the Data Protection Act 1998) or funding body and sponsor requirements (such as UKRI'S common principles on data policy).
- Preserving and sharing your data increases the visibility of your research by increasing citations and facilitating the long-term impact of your research: published articles whose underlying data are also published often receive more citations than those whose data are kept private, and data reuse can be used as evidence of impact (see the research article on the PLOS ONE website).
- Preserving and sharing your research data also creates new resources for teaching.
More information
If you wish to preserve and share research data or materials that are related to the University of Westminster, we have a specialist Records and Archives team (see the Records and Archive services pages) who can be contacted via [email protected].
Contact us
For further guidance and support, contact the Research Data Management Officer at [email protected].