Data publishing has been gaining momentum, due to an increasing awareness of the benefits in publishing and re-using data, alongside the growing requirements of funding bodies that data be made publicly available. By publishing your research data you can:

• ensure the replication and verification of work;
• enable formal and measureable recognition of data as a research output;
• reduce the duplication of data collection;
• allow the re-use of data in multi- and interdisciplinary research;
• ensure greater transparency in the research process.
• Achieve maximum returns on investment in research

In Australia the publishing of research data is encouraged by the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. It states that research data should be made available for use by other researchers unless it is prevented by ethical, privacy or confidentiality matters. Increasingly, funding agencies are placing the onus on researchers to publish research data that has been collected using public funds.

Data Publishing

• There are a number of ways to publish your research data. Researchers can deposit their data into an institutional repository. The UQ Library is soon launching a new service, with UQ eSpace accepting data. Alternatively, there are many discipline specific data repositories that will accept research data, and make it available or discoverable to other researchers.

Data Licensing

• One of the common barriers to publishing research data is concerns about attribution and recognition of data and researchers. These concerns can be addressed through the implementation of DOI's (or persistent identifiers) for datasets at the time they are published or deposited into a repository, allowing the data to be correctly cited. Researchers can also apply Creative Commons licensing to their data to ensure that any future use or reuse of that data is appropriate and correctly cited.

The most recent newsletter from TERN discusses some of the initiatives that are in place to remove the barriers to data publishing.

Many researchers at UQ are already publishing their data. If you would like to publish your research data, the UQ Library's Research Data Management team can assist you.

Hot topic in the news today, is the latest article published in Nature - Towards Practical, high -capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA, which demonstrates a new technique to store and transport human-made data.
Johnathan Keith in The Conversation reported, their data included some well-chosen iconic elements: Shakespeare's 154 sonnets, Watson and Crick's classic paper on the structure of DNA, and a colour photograph of the European Bioinformatics Institute.

Read the latest news coverage and discussion on this exciting development.

Jan 24 2013

• The Conversation - Jonathan Keith DNA data storage
• ABC News - Shakespeare's sonnets encoded in DNA
• BBC News - DNA 'perfect for digital storage'

The National Academies Press has published a compendium of academic thinking about sharing academic data, "The Future of Scientific Knowledge Discovery in Open Networked Environments: Summary of a Workshop." It is available to download free as a PDF.

David Wojick, writing for the scholarly kitchen, notes that while the word "data" is not in the title, it occurs over 1,200 times in the report.

The report is largely an exercise in envisioning the possible opportunities for scientific discovery presented by extensive data sharing, based on large-scale, present-day examples. Read his full article here.

With the temperatures expected to rise in Queensland today. Why not explore the weather data available via the Australian Bureau of Meteorology.

Climate Data Online provides access to a wide range of weather data including:

• statistics
• historical weather observations
• climatology maps
• weather station data (fees apply)
• Australian specific climate data

Australian Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN) data discovery portal is now LAUNCHED. TERN's mission is "to link the science and scientists both within and across disciplines" through a data portal which will collect, store and distribute important data.

Major datasets from Australian scientists are discoverable in this portal, they include:

• Planets & animals
• Vegetation
• Terrestrial ecosystem
• Ecological dynamics
• Freshwater & estuarine
• Land surface & soils

To discover more, go to TERN Data Discovery Portal.

Big data, the collection and analysis of large amounts of data is in the news:

• The current issue of Research Trends is a special issue is on 'Big Data' - it covers the evolution of Big Data as a scientific topic, how big datasets can be used to inform funding and science policy decisions, data analytics and visualisation and the use of big datasets in bibliometric research.
• Listen to the BBC World Service as to Why big data is so big.
• Two articles from the Age: (1) Gene data guru and stormwater expert win top prize on how biology experiments generate masses of data and the role of bioinformatics and (2) Deciphering the big data buzz.
• A Wired post looks at the future of big data. An issue of Nature back in 2008 examined what big data sets mean for contemporary science.
• Type "big data" into Summon on the Library website to find more articles.