Data Search: See Discover and Reuse Data
Data Management Planning: DMPTool
Working with Active Data: OSF
Publishing Datasets:
Zenodo (for larger datasets)
ZU Scholars (for smaller datasets)
Publishing Metadata: ZU Scholars
Need help? Contact researchdata@zu.ac.ae
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.
To make your data...
More information: FORCE11 Group: FAIR Data Principles
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.
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 |
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.
See our ZU Scholars Guide for more information on ZU Scholars.