LibGuides: Research Data Management: Data Archives and Repositories

Need Help?

Selecting a Data Repository

Choosing what type of repository best suits your data ultimately depends on research area, the sensitivity of the data and the features of the repository. If it is also possible that if your research is funded, that your funder will indicate where the data should ultimately be deposited.

Human participants data may be sensitive depending on the dataset size, population, and topics covered (among other things). It's important to assess the risk of harm that inappropriate disclosure of the data could pose to the participants. At more than minimal risk, data should be deposited in a repository that has access controls.
Data sensitivity may also be affected by other factors not related to human participants such as geolocations of endangered species or interests to national security.
Disciplinary and data-type repositories often offer the most robust features for data in their collection purview (analytics, security, detailed metadata, etc.).

Duke Research Data Curation and Research Data Repository (RDR)

The Duke University Libraries provides a Research Data Curation Program and data publishing through the Duke Research Data Repository (RDR). According to the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Data curation activities can be defined those that "enable data discovery and retrieval, maintain its quality, add value, and provide for reuse over time, and...includes authentication, archiving, management, preservation, retrieval, and representation."

This program assists Duke researchers who need to provide access to data underlying funded research or scholarly publications and those who wish to promote and share their research findings through open access. Data curators review and assess data deposits for completeness, provide guidance and recommendations if changes are needed, and facilitate the ingest of the data into Duke's RDR. RDR Depositors are provided with a DOI that they can include with publications, presentations and other promotional materials so that others may access and use their data for reproducibility purposes as well as brand new research.

If you are interested in learning more about the Research Data Curation Program and/or the Duke Research Data Repository (RDR), please contact datamanagement@duke.edu.

RDR and the FAIR Guiding Principles

Discipline Based Repositories

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
The Odum Institute Data Archive The central mission of the Odum Institute Archive is the ongoing acquisition and preservation of social science data. Prior to accession into the Archive, potential data submissions are reviewed to ensure adherence to our appraisal guidelines. Suitable data collections are then processed for preservation and are released for user access. The Archive accepts donations of data that complement the scope of the Odum Institute Data Archive collection, particularly those datasets that focus on topics related to the Southern region of the United States and state-level public opinion polls. We accept data in a variety of formats in order to accommodate data depositors but we prefer fully documented SPSS, SAS, or Stata files containing variable and value labels with complete and accurate documentation.
Qualitative Data Repository The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) is a dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data (and accompanying documentation) generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences. QDR provides search tools to facilitate the discovery of data, and also serves as a portal to material beyond its own holdings, with links to U.S. and international archives. The repository’s initial emphasis is on political science.
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, located at Cornell University, is one of the world’s leading archives of social science data, specializing in data from public opinion surveys. The Center’s mission is to collect, preserve, and disseminate public opinion data; to serve as a resource to help improve the practice of survey research; and to broaden the understanding of public opinion through the use of survey data in the United States and abroad.

Biosharing An online catalog of data standards, biological databases, and data policies, designed to provide support and guidance for how to format and deposit data.
DataMed DataMed is a prototype biomedical data search engine. Its goal is to discover data sets across data repositories or data aggregators. In the future it will allow searching outside these boundaries. DataMed supports the NIH-endorsed FAIR principles of Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of datasets with current functionality assisting in finding datasets and providing access information about them.
Dryad The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes. It is well-used by researchers in the biological and life sciences and recommended and/or required as repository of record by certain journals in those areas as well.
NCBI Data and Software Submissions NCBI collects submissions of data for the world's largest public repository of biological and scientific information. GenBank, BioProject and PubChem are part of NCBI.
NIH Data Sharing Repositories NIH-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse. Most accept submissions of appropriate data from NIH-funded investigators (and others), but some restrict data submission to only those researchers involved in a specific research network.
Zenodo While now touting itself as a general archive, Zenodo is hosted by CERN and got its start as a scientific data repository and many still use it as their community archive.

Humanities Commons: CORE CORE is a full-text, interdisciplinary, non-profit social repository designed to increase the impact of work in the Humanities. Brought to you by the Modern Language Association (MLA).
Open Context Open Context reviews, edits, annotates, publishes and archives research data and digital documentation. We publish your data and preserve it with leading digital libraries. We take steps beyond archiving to richly annotate and integrate your analyses, maps and media. This links your data to the wider world and broadens the impact of your ideas.
National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture The National Archive of Data on Arts and Culture (NADAC) is a repository that facilitates research on arts and culture by acquiring data, particularly those funded by federal agencies and other organizations, and sharing those data with researchers, policymakers, people in the arts and culture field, and the general public. This is a thematic archive hosted by ICPSR.
Qualitative Data Repository QDR selects, ingests, curates, archives, manages, durably preserves, and provides access to digital data used in qualitative and multi-method social inquiry. While primarily social science-focused, they will accept data from other disciplines as appropriate.

Duke-supported Repositories

Duke supports the use of several data repositories by either hosting, having a membership, or prepaying for deposits on behalf of Duke researchers.

Duke Research Data Repository The Duke Research Data Repository accepts data, documentation, software, and other code related to the teaching and research mission of Duke University, including data linked to a publication, research project, and/or class projects. Data deposit is open to all members of the Duke Community with a valid netid. All data are openly accessible for direct download.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) An international consortium of more than 750 academic institutions and research organizations, ICPSR provides leadership and training in data access, curation, and methods of analysis for the social science research community. ICPSR maintains a data archive of more than 250,000 files of research in the social and behavioral sciences. It hosts 21 specialized collections of data in education, aging, criminal justice, substance abuse, terrorism, and other fields.
Morphosource Morphosource is a Duke-based repository for media (3D and 2D) that represent physical objects. This includes CT/MRI, photogrammetry, laser scans, and others
OBIS-SEAMAP As a thematic node of the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS), a group of investigators, led by Andrew Read and Patrick Halpin of Duke University, started building Ocean Biogeographic Information System Spatial Ecological Analysis of Megavertebrate Populations (OBIS-SEAMAP), a spatially, temporally interactive online database for marine mammal, sea turtle, seabird and ray & shark data back in 2002. This service is made possible by data sharing from contributors all over the world.
Qualitative Data Repository The Qualitative Data Repository (QDR) is a dedicated archive for storing and sharing digital data (and accompanying documentation) generated or collected through qualitative and multi-method research in the social sciences. QDR provides search tools to facilitate the discovery of data, and also serves as a portal to material beyond its own holdings, with links to U.S. and international archives. The repository’s initial emphasis is on political science.
Vivli Vivli's mission is to promote, coordinate, and facilitate scientific sharing and reuse of clinical research data through the creation and implementation of a sustainable global data-sharing enterprise. We act as a neutral broker between data contributor, data user and the wider data sharing community.

General Repositories

Dryad The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes. It is well-used by researchers in the biological and life sciences and recommended and/or required as repository of record by certain journals in those areas as well.
figshare figshare allows users to upload any file format to be previewed in the browser so that any research output, from posters and presentations to datasets and code, can be disseminated in a way that the current scholarly publishing model does not allow.
Harvard Dataverse The Harvard Dataverse is a general repository that anyone can use to host and disseminate their data. Read more about the Dataverse Project at http://dataverse.org/.
re3data.org This is a registry of research data repositories (a meta catalog). The best way to search, if you do not have a repository in mind, is to browse by country or subject. Keep in mind the size of this site can make it tough to navigate and some links may be broken. Contact us if you need help identifying a repository.
UNC Dataverse The UNC Dataverse is open to researchers worldwide and across disciplines to deposit their research data. Benefits to depositors include the long-term preservation of data, the creation of a stable data citation including a persistent identifier, and increased visibility of research products through inclusion within the Dataverse catalog. Depositing data into the UNC Dataverse also fulfills aspects of funding agency and journal policies for data management and sharing.
Zenodo The OpenAIRE project, in the vanguard of the open access and open data movements in Europe was commissioned by the EC to support their nascent Open Data policy by providing a catch-all repository for EC funded research. CERN, an OpenAIRE partner and pioneer in open source, open access and open data, provided this capability and Zenodo was launched in May 2013. Now any and all data from around the world are welcome! Data are hosted by CERN.