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Open Access for Grad Students: Sharing Research Products

This guide is designed to help graduate students (and others) learn about open access concepts.

Why Share Research Products?

Research products are any item created when planning, carrying out, or ending your research project. This may include Research Scoping documents, Datasets, Code files, survey questions...

Researchers may share research products for many different reasons. Some reasons may be:

  • To support the reproducibility of the research
  • To meet journal requirements for sharing datasets and/or code
  • To meet grant requirements for sharing datasets and/or code
  • To find collaborators
  • To make research products available to populations who were part of the research
  • To provide evidence of when their research project started
  • To ensure they can find their own research easily in the future
  • To expand their research impact and make multiple research products citeable
  • To avoid hiding research labor

You can share as much of your research as you want. If you share one kind of research product (a dataset, lines of code, survey questions), you are not obligated to share all of your research products.

Some reasons to not share, to delay sharing, or to restrict access to research products:

  • This information could reasonably endanger conservation efforts
  • This information could reasonably endanger a population of people
  • This information is sensitive or personally identifying
  • The population included in the research requested this information not be shared
  • This information is proprietary
  • This information can easily be misinterpreted without context

Sharing data? Please visit our Managing Research Data from Start to Finish LibGuide. The guide is focused on NIH funded research, but the basic principles will apply to any research data project.

Planning Stages

Before you and your co-researchers start your research project, your team should design a plan for sharing, and not sharing, different research products.

It is best to prepare agreements like Data Management Plans before starting any research, but these plans can also be created during research projects. Agreements help keep everyone accountable, and, as researchers join and leave projects, their duties can be easily reassigned.

General steps for creating Sharing Plans:

  1. Identify what research products you expect to produce during your project. (Surveys, Research Scope Documents, Datasets, Code...)
  2. Plan how research products will be stored and accessed during your project.
  3. Decide which research products will be shared.
  4. Identify what platforms on which you will share your research products. (Consider your audience, your discipline, desired access restrictions...)
  5. Name the researcher who will be responsible for preparing each research product to be shared. (Anonymizing data, creating README files...)
  6. Name the researcher who will be responsible for sharing each research product.

The DMP Tool is a website that can guide you through the creation of a Data Management and Sharing Plan. DMP Tool includes guides for federal grants from different agencies.

Platforms, Websites, and Databases

Sharing Code

Code can be more complicated to share than other research products. There are two major considerations with sharing code:

  1. Which version of your code did you use in your research?
  2. Do you want other researchers to use or modify your code?

Code needs proper versioning. Each version of your code needs to be citable, so it is clear what code you or other researchers have used.

Code needs documentation and comments inside the code itself. This will help others use and understand your code. It will also ensure that you do not forget anything about your own code if you need to revisit it later.

Shared code also needs Open Source Licenses. These open source licenses tell other researchers how your code can, and can't, be used.

One of the easier ways to share code is by adding your GitHub code to the Zenodo Repository. Zenodo will understand and interpret the GitHub versioning, and Zenodo will create citable DOIs for each version of your code. GitHub and Zenodo Instructions.

DOIs

A DOI is a persistent identifier. A DOI is a stable link that should always lead to the same item on the internet. DOIs can break if not properly maintained, but any large, stable repository should be trustworthy to maintain their DOIs.

You want any item you plan on sharing online to have a DOI (or other persistent identifier). Other researchers will have an easier time finding, saving, and citing your research products if they have a stable link to the item.

ORCID

ORCID is a free system that gives you a unique digital identifier. This digital identifier is only attached to your account. It distinguishes you against other people with your same name, and it identifies you even if you publish under different institutions or with different versions of your name.

You can allow ORCID to automatically list all of your publications as you are published. When you need to put together your promotion and tenure materials or a grant application, all of your work will already be in one place!

ORCID can sync with other profile services if given permission. These ORCID Syncing Instructions can guide you through linking your ORCID and Web of Science accounts.Your Web of Science account will then update to match your ORCID account when ORCID pulls in your publications.

Licensing

When you share a research product, it is best to attach a Creative Commons license to the item. Creative Commons licenses are "additions" to the standard copyright coverage the item already has.

If you already have the copyright for the item, adding a Creative Commons license does not forfeit your copyright (except for CC0). All other Creative Commons licenses only mean that you have pre-approved certain uses as defined by the license. People will not need to ask your permission if they want to use one of your works in a pre-approved way.