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Data Management & Sharing: Sharing your Data - Post-Publication Phase:
Data Repositories and File Formats

The GSU library can help you manage your working data, write data management plans for grants, and make your data accessible for future researchers.
Why share your data after you've exhausted it for your own research purposes? Because your granting agency likely requires it...

In February 2013, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) released Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research, a policy memorandum directing federal agencies to develop plans to make the publications resulting from federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication, and directing researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research, with the goal of also making these data publicly accessible post-project. Check out SPARC's "Browse Data Sharing Requirements by Federal Agency" site for quick snapshots of the current/forthcoming data sharing requirements.

GSU Data Retention Policy

GSU's Assistant Vice President for Research & Strategic Initiatives advises adhering to the USG Records Retention Schedules policy for how long GSU researchers should keep research records, which details situations for how long each type of research record needs to be kept—up to permanent.  

Deposit your Data in ScholarWorks@Georgia State University

Our ScholarWorks@Georgia State University institutional repository supports archiving data as well as scholarly publications. ScholarWorks@Georgia State University offers:

  • Unlimited storage
  • Authorization and access-control
  • Support for all file types and formats
  • Multiple back-ups, cloud storage, and quarterly archives
  • Ability to link raw datasets to associated publications
  • Customizable metadata to assist data re-use and discoverability

Contact the ScholarWorks@Georgia State University staff to find out more about archiving your data or use Open a Form button in the box below to submit info about your data!

ScholarWorks@GSU Data Deposit

Writing a Grant and Need Boilerplate Language?

Lists of Data Repositories - Multiple Disciplines

Depositing your data in a research data repository will facilitate its discovery and preservation. 

The sites listed below are multidisciplinary lists that are being updated as new repositories are added. Contact any repository you think might be appropriate for your data to ensure they are able to preserve your data long term.

File Formats for Long-Term Access/Archiving

For ensuring long-term usability of digital files, the following nonproprietary file formats are generally recommended:

  • ODF, not Word
  • ASCII or CSV, not Excel, SPSS, SAS, Stata, etc.
  • MPEG-4, not Quicktime
  • TIFF or JPEG2000, not GIF or JPG
  • XML or RDF, not RDBMS

For more detailed discussion of preferred/acceptable file formats, consult the Library of Congress Recommended Format Specifications linked below.

Image adapted from public domain images at wpclipart.com

Social Sciences Data

Data for the Humanities

Many repositories accept data from any discipline, including humanities. Some subject-specific repositories for humanities data also exist. For more information about data curation in the humanities disciplines, see the Digital Humanities Curation Guide.