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Research Data Management

FAIR Principles of Research Data

When working with research data, you should always try to follow the FAIR principles. These are guidelines on how to make your data Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

How to be FAIR?

To make your data...

  • Findable: Use rich metadata and a persistent identifiers. Submit your data in a searchable source
  • Accessible: Use open protocols. Make metadata accessible even if the actual data is not. Include authentication steps if necessary
  • Interoperable: Use open formats and follow community standards (keywords, controlled vocabularies and ontologies)
  • Reusable: Provide clear documentation and a usage license (e.g. Creative Commons)

More information: FORCE11 Group: FAIR Data Principles

Describing your Data with Metadata

Metadata is structured information that describes, explains, locates, or otherwise makes it easier to retrieve, use, or manage an information resource. Metadata is often called data about data or information about information.

Typical metadata elements include:

Metadata type Example properties

Descriptive metadata

 Title
Author
Subject
Genre
Publication date

Technical metadata

 File type
File size
Creation date/time
Compression scheme

Preservation metadata

 Checksum
Preservation event

Rights metadata

 Copyright status
License terms
Rights holder

Structural metadata

 Sequence
Place in hierarchy

Markup languages

Paragraph
Heading
List
Name
Date

Source: NISO Primer: Understanding Metadata: What is Metadata, and What is it For?

Dublin Core (DC) and Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) are two metadata standards that are generally used to describe datasets. Additionally, many disciplines also have their own metadata standards. See UCF Library Metadata Guide for more information on domain-specific standards.

Licensing your Datasets

Creative Commons licenses

Creative Commons (CC) licenses can be used to give others the right to share, use, and build upon a work that you have created. CC licenses provide flexibility and also protect the people who use or redistribute your work from concerns of copyright infringement as long as they abide by the conditions that are specified in the license. Using CC licenses is highly recommended (when applicable).

There are different CC licenses, each with different terms. You can use the CC License Chooser to check which license would work best for you.

Code Title Terms
CC BY Attribution Allows all use but attribution is required
CC BY-SA Attribution-ShareAlike Allows all use but derivative works must be shared with the same license
CC BY-NC Attribution-NonCommercial Allows all non-commercial use
CC BY-ND Attribution-NoDerivatives Allows all redistribution but no derivative works
CC BY-NC-SA Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Allows redistribution and all non-commercial use but derivative works must be shared with the same license
CC BY-NC-ND Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives Allows non-commercial redistribution but no derivative works

Where to Publish my Data?

You can publish your data in a general repository (OSF, FigShare, Zenodo, Mendeley Data, Harvard Dataverse) or ZU Scholars. If you have a larger dataset, please contact scholars@zu.ac.ae before submitting files to ZU Scholars. See also Discover and Reuse Data for other repositories.

You should also consider publishing a data article of your dataset and data collection processes. Data articles are peer-reviewed, citable papers that describe research data without analysis or conclusions.

Submitting Research Data to ZU Scholars

  1. Log in at https://zuscholars.zu.ac.ae
  2. Select Datasets
  3. Click Submit Research under Author Corner
  4. Review and accept the Submission Agreement
  5. Enter the basic metadata (required fields are marked separately)
  6. Add your data file by clicking Upload file from your computer
  7. If you want to add additional files, tick the box under Additional Files (can be added after clicking submit)
  8. Click Submit

See our ZU Scholars Guide for more information on ZU Scholars.