Best practice in research data publication

Abstract

Open science practices like the publication of research data promote transparency and quality as well as and visibility of scientific work. It may open up important possibilities for further research. Many research funding agencies, universities and science organisations are committed to the publication of research data as a standard of scientific practice. However, researchers still struggle with data publication, often because curation efforts for data are in competition with other tasks and related uncertainness about impact on career advancement and reputation.

A further aspect hindering widespread practice of data publication is lack of awareness of how and where to publish data according to current best practices. To overcome the latter, current elements of best practices in data publishing according to current FAIR and Open recommendations, including insights from the project ‘Enabling FAIR Data in the Earth, Space, and Environmental Sciences’ and examples from the data publishing platform ‘GFZ Data Services’ will be presented. Among others, author requirements for data description, licensing of data sets as well as current efforts in open data metrics will be addressed.