Talk by Mercè Crosas at the Harvard Research Data Access and Innovation Symposium:

http://projects.iq.harvard.edu/researchdataaccessandinnovationsymposium

The research community needs reliable, standard ways to make the data produced by scientific research available to the community, while giving credit to data authors. As a result, a new form of scholarly publication is emerging: data publishing. Data publishing - or making data reusable, citable, and accessible for long periods - is more than simply providing a link to a data file or posting the data to the researcher’s web site. We will discuss best practices, including the use of persistent identifiers and full data citations, the importance of metadata, the choice between public data and restricted data with terms of use, the workflows for collaboration and review before data release, and the role of trusted archival repositories. The Harvard Dataverse repository (and the Dataverse open-source software) provides a solution for data publishing, making it easy for researchers to follow these best practices, while satisfying data management requirements and incentivizing the sharing of research data.