Category: Open Data

Celebrating Open Research Data with a DATA.NCL Upload Competition

For Open Access Week (October 19-25), Figshare is running a research data upload competition, offering prizes for participating institutions who upload the most items and researchers who upload during that week.

Data.ncl, Newcastle’s Research Data Repository, is powered by Figshare so all data uploaders – regardless of whether we are a winning institution – will have a chance to win one of five £100 Amazon gift vouchers, distributed virtually. Figshare will also be making a $500 donation to Resourcing Racial Justice, an organization that supports individuals and communities working towards racial justice.

Items must be uploaded to data.ncl between 12am on 19th October until 11:59pm on 25th October. Where possible we would encourage the data to be openly available, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be published if you require more time to prepare the dataset.

This is a little incentive to find some time during Open Access Week to prepare and share that dataset you been sitting on or meaning to archive. Some of the key benefits of sharing data through data.ncl are:

  • The data is assigned a persistent identifier (DOI) and a citation provided, so the data can be formally attributed
  • The persistent identifier helps to make the data discoverable through Google and other search engines to maximise visibility and impact of the research
  • Data can be located and accessed by you, without having to actively manage it

Since data.ncl was launched in April 2019, Newcastle researchers and PGRs have archived and shared 486 datasets, which have been viewed nearly 270,000 times across the world. ​Datasets have also been downloaded over 50,000 times and cited by researchers who have went on to reuse the data.

Data.ncl is not just for data but also code/ software and methodology so you can archive and share on the research process as well as any data outputs. There is guidance on how to archive data in data.ncl and you can get in touch with the Research Data Service on support in planning, managing and sharing research data at rdm@ncl.ac.uk. 

Happy uploading!