13  Where to publish

When people write the following:

The data/code will be made available upon request.

This usually means:

Once the PhD student who wrote this paper leaves their position, the data/code will be lost in space.

Am I right? But how can you do better? How can you make your research outputs available?

Publish in a repository

Publish your research outputs in a repository. You basically have three options here:

A field specific service that is currently being built for the BERD community is the BERD Portal (see video).

Please make sure to use a trustworthy service. How to check if a service is trustworthy? My rule of thumb is that services that have investor backing (e.g. Figshare) are less trustworthy than services backed by the research community (e.g. Zenodo, which is developed by OpenAIRE and CERN). Why? Well, I think an Open Science service should not be driven primarily by commercial goals. At some point commercial services will take money from you, if that may be by selling your data, by locking your uploaded material behind a pay wall, or in another way.

Publish with the paper

Some journals offer to publish your research outputs with your paper. I will be honest, I have mixed feelings about this. Not all journals which offer this, really have the expertise to do so and they don’t necessarily have the possibility to store data long term. For one of my papers we uploaded the material with the journal, but the link to the material keeps vanishing and I keep getting the confused emails of interested readers. So, make sure the journal you upload your material to, ensures long term storage and availability 🧐.

If your research outputs cannot be shared openly

What should you do if you cannot publish your research outputs openly?

If you have sensitive data (e.g. patient data) and no consent, do not publish the data! There are other options for you.

If for any reason you cannot share your research outputs, think of options how you can still ensure that others can trust in the reproducibility of your research.

  • Can you maybe publish the metadata and the code?
  • Can you publish a synthetic version of your data?
  • Can you share the data with specific people (e.g. researchers in the same field)?

Brainstorm with your peers, librarians, or IT support. There are always solutions that are better than publishing nothing.

Further reading