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Research Data Management

SMU Dataverse

The Library has an institutional Dataverse in Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, where you can manage and share your data. If you have data you would like to upload, contact LibraryRDM@smu.ca. 

Dataverse is a publicly accessible data repository platform, open to affiliated researchers to deposit and share research data openly with anyone in the world. Researchers control levels of access, which can be defined right down to individual files. Files can be made public, be open to specific individuals, or kept completely private. It is free and built with open-source software, it is hosted on Canadian servers, provides data visualization tools for tabular data files, provides DOIs through DataCite Canada and more: Dataverse FAQ

Preparing your data for upload

Before uploading your data to a repository, it is helpful to answer the following questions: 

  1. Are you the principal investigator? If you are not the PI, you may need to get the PI's permission to share the data, and/or ensure they are aware of the plan.
  2. How much data do you have? (in MB/GB/TB)
  3. Do you have any existing documentation (readme.txt, lab notebooks, a DMP) with a description of the data, file naming conventions, and methodology for the data collection?
  4. Did you use an existing metadata schema?
  5. Are there existing constraints or requirements placed on your data archiving and/or sharing? (Grants, journal data policies, research networks, etc.)?
  6.  Are there specific restrictions on the data (legal, ethical, intellectual property)?
  7. Is there a repository specific to your industry/discipline where your data would be the most useful? 

If you require assistance in answering any of these questions, please contact us at LibraryRDM@smu.ca.

Other Repositories

FRDR - Federated Research Data Repository This repository is for Canadian researchers to deposit and share research data. If you are interested in using FRDR, check out the "Before Depositing" page on the FRDR website. The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) has a Youtube channel with video tutorials for FRDR.

re3data.org The Registry of Research Data Repositories. Search or browse the repository by subject, content type or country.

Open Access Directory (OAD) provides a growing list of open access data repositories by subject. 

The ODESI Data Portal is a web-based data discovery tool that provides access to data and metadata for thousands of data files (including those from Statistics Canada, Gallup, the Canadian Opinion Research Archive, ICPSR, and more).  

Zenodo The international OpenAIRE repository hosted by CERN.

SMU Institutional Repository houses SMU theses, faculty publications, and more.