​Archiving your data

The University is committed to research excellence and integrity. As such, it seeks to promote high standards of research data management throughout the research data lifecycle. Please familiarise yourself with the Research Data Management Policy.

Many funders (including the UKRI Research Councils) and publishers expect data with an acknowledged long-term value to be preserved and remain accessible and useable for future research. Data which supports and validates your published research should also be preserved and, where possible, should be openly accessible to other interested researchers.

Data we want to store:

• Research data that funders require to be made available
• Data that directly supports publications
• Data that promotes your research and future partnerships
• Anonymised "personal" data

Data we do not want to store:

• Data that is already stored elsewhere in another data repository or archive
• Everything you have

If you have to preserve sensitive or confidential data and you do not have secure storage available please contact rdm@lboro.ac.uk. We will be able to work with you to assess what the best solution will be for your circumstances.

A) If your research is funded, check whether your funder has specific requirements regarding what and where your research data should be deposited. Major funders' data policies are available on the Digital Curation Centre website.

Support from Loughborough University Library for compliance on various funder Open Research policies is available. Specific details are available.

B) ESRC data can be deposited in the UK Data Service and NERC data can be deposited in one of the NERC data centres. EPSRC has published research data expectations. Other data centres also exist:

• Dryad
• Figshare
• Zenodo

A comprehensive list of data repositories can be found on the Re3data website.

C) Please familiarise yourself with your publisher's policy on making your data available. Some publisher's mandate the deposit of data in a repository or archive. Links to a number of publisher data policies include:

• Elsevier
• Nature
• PLOS
• Springer-Nature
• Wiley
• Taylor and Francis

Before you deposit your data in the reseaarch repository please ensure that your data is understandable to others; you have removed personal identifiers (if applicable); and you have permission to deposit the data.

For example, do you have data sharing agreements in place with any collaborators and/or received permission from relevant copyright holders.

Subject to any contractual arrangements and/or grant conditions that take precedence, deposit your research data in Loughborough's Research Repository where it will be securely preserved and given a citeable DOI. For data that is held elsewhere, add metadata only records.

A) Log into the Research Repository using your University username and password

B) Click on "Create a new item"

C) Complete the metadata fields with as much detail as you can

D) If you know the DOI of the related article please include this in the "References" field

E) Either upload or drag and drag your files onto the record

F) If your data has to be embargoed please add a reason for the embargo - this will appear on the record. You can embargo either the whole record (i.e. neither the metadata or associated files will be visible) or just the data file(s) (i.e. the metadata will visible but the associated file(s) will be hidden)

G) To send the record (and data) for curation click on "Publish this item", then on "Publish item", and then click "Yes publish". We have included these extra steps to reduce the chance of data being published by mistake. Research Repository staff will check your deposit and you will receive an email when the record is published