Select data for publication

Select your data for publication

How to select data for publication?

Legal obligations

Look at your consortium agreement, patent, funder contract or any other contract to find out whether there are any restrictions on data sharing and whether you must retain or destroy certain data. All data should not be published.

If your dataset includes personal data, you must comply with the GDPR. Under the GDPR, personal data can only be preserved for the time necessary to reach the original goals of the data processing and must then be safely destroyed. However, there might be exceptions for scientific, statistical or historical purposes. Please look at our website for further information on GDPR.

In addition to personal data, there may be other restrictions on opening and sharing data. For example, does your dataset contain confidential data, data protected by copyright, data with commercial potential or data that would breach a prior commitment to share data (for example, a consortium agreement, etc.) ?

Other data

For other data, you may choose what data to keep in considering their uniqueness, long-term value and potential of reuse. You may, for example, want to keep certain data to validate your publication’s results, for future teaching and research. However, take also into account the costs (time, software, etc.) and efforts required to preserve these data (and associated preparation, documentation, and storage steps).

Period of preservation

Depending on these (legal) aspects, you may state a period of preservation: some data will be obsolete in 2, 5, 10 or 50 years, depending on the research topic.

Go further:

For further information, see the Digital Curation Center Guide : Whyte A., DCC, Five steps to decide what data to keep: a checklist for appraising research data (v.1), Edinburgh: Digital Curation Centre, 2014.