Research Data Repositories

What are research data? 

Research data are quantitative and qualitative sources of information gathered to support technical or scientific enquiry, research, scholarship, and creative practice. Research data are used as evidence in the research process and are commonly used in the research community as a method for validating, identifying or refuting research findings and claims. Research data are collected and used in scholarship across all academic disciplines and may take many forms such as experimental trial data, observational data, tracking data, third party and public sector data, monitoring data, processed data, visual data, and repurposed data.

Digital forms of research data may include documents, spreadsheets, laboratory notebooks, field manuals, diaries, questionnaires, transcripts, codebooks, video, sound recordings, photographs, films, designs or other graphical representations, test responses, slides, artefacts, specimens, samples, data files, models, algorithms, scripts, methodologies and workflows, protocols and more.

What do research data repositories provide? 

  • support for public and restricted data
  • long-term access to data
  • support for data publishing workflows and versioning of data
  • assistance with creation of information (metadata) about data to find, understand and reuse them
  • a formal data citation to reference and find data
  • a persistent identifier (such as a DOI) to data 
  • assistance with meeting journal or publisher requirements for authors to deposit and/or share research data associated with their publications
  • assistance with meeting funding agency guidelines

Where should I deposit my research data?

There are many reputable repositories including general repositories, discipline-specific repositories and government repositories. Trent University Library has two repositories that may serve your needs, and we can also refer you to other general or discipline-specific research data repositories. Key repositories include: 

Borealis Trent Dataverse Collection 

Borealis, the Canadian Dataverse Repository, is a bilingual, multidisciplinary, secure, Canadian research repository, supported by academic libraries and research institutions across Canada. 

Trent University Dataverse Collection is part of Scholars Portal's Borealis. Borealis supports open discovery, management, sharing and preservation of Canadian research data. Trent researchers from all disciplines are invited to deposit their data in Trent University Dataverse Collection. We  can set up individual researchers and/ or research groups to actively manage their data, share it securely with colleagues, provide version control, establish a permanent data citation, get a DOI for your dataset, and more. All data are hosted securely on Canadian servers. 

For Further Information, see Trent Borealis Dataverse Collection. 

Trent University Digital Collections

Trent University Digital Collections includes a digital library of resources created at Trent or by members of Trent University. We encourage members of the university to contact the library about depositing pre or post-prints, conference papers, audio files, and other research outputs and course materials.

FRDR 

FRDR (Federated Research Data Repository) is a Canadian national multi-disciplinary research repository. It supports long term preservation of larger data sets. FRDR accepts content from Principle Investigators (PIs), or their sponsored designates, from any and all domains or subject areas. PIs must be a faculty member, librarian, or community-based researcher at an eligible Canadian institution or organization. 

Discipline-specific data repositories

In some instances, it may be appropriate to deposit your research data in a discipline-specific repository. Here are some useful lists of repositories:

Re3data.org Registry of Research Data Repositories  is an online registry of data repositories, which can be searched by subject, content type and country. Find a list of Canadian research data repositories. 

The Open Access Directory (OAD)  is a list of open data access data repositories

Contact us

For assistance with archiving theses, pre or post-prints, conference papers, audio files, and other research outputs and course materials contact:

Dwayne Collins
Learning & Liaison / Digital Initiatives Librarian
Trent University Library

For assistance with Trent Dataverse Collection and managing research data including spatial data, maps, surveys, microdata and statistical data files contact:

Tracy Sallaway
Research Data Services Librarian & 
Head, Maps, Data & Government Information Centre
Trent University Library

We look forward to hearing from you and providing assistance!