Scientific Data is an open-access, online-only journal for descriptions of scientifically valuable datasets. Our articles, known as Data Descriptors, combine traditional narrative content with curated, structured descriptions (metadata) of the published data to provide a new framework for data-sharing and -reuse that we believe will ultimately accelerate the pace of scientific discovery. These principles are designed to align with and support the FAIR Principles for scientific data management and stewardship, which declare that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
This table lists NIH-supported data repositories that make data accessible for reuse. Most accept submissions of appropriate data from NIH-funded investigators (and others), but some restrict data submission to only those researchers involved in a specific research network. Also included are resources that aggregate information about biomedical data and information sharing systems. The table can be sorted according by name and by NIH Institute or Center and may be searched using keywords so that you can find repositories more relevant to your data. Links are provided to information about submitting data to and accessing data from the listed repositories. Additional information about the repositories and points-of-contact for further information or inquiries can be found on the websites of the individual repositories.
The Home of the U.S. Government's Open Data. Here you will find data, tools, and resources to conduct research, develop web and mobile applications, design data visualizations, and more.
This site is dedicated to making high value health data more accessible to entrepreneurs, researchers, and policy makers in the hopes of better health outcomes for all.
The Dryad Digital Repository is a curated resource that makes the data underlying scientific publications discoverable, freely reusable, and citable. Dryad provides a general-purpose home for a wide diversity of datatypes.
Dryad’s vision is to promote a world where research data is openly available, integrated with the scholarly literature, and routinely re-used to create knowledge.
Our mission is to provide the infrastructure for, and promote the re-use of, data underlying the scholarly literature.
Dryad is governed by a nonprofit membership organization. Membership is open to any stakeholder organization, including but not limited to journals, scientific societies, publishers, research institutions, libraries, and funding organizations.
Publishers are encouraged to facilitate data archiving by coordinating the submission of manuscripts with submission of data to Dryad. Learn more about submission integration.
Dryad originated from an initiative among a group of leading journals and scientific societies in evolutionary biology and ecology to adopt a joint data archiving policy (JDAP) for their publications, and the recognition that easy-to-use, sustainable, community-governed data infrastructure was needed to support such a policy.
Mapping the human brain is one of the great scientific challenges of the 21st century. The Human Connectome Project (HCP) is tackling a key aspect of this challenge by elucidating the neural pathways that underlie brain function and behavior. Deciphering this amazingly complex wiring diagram will reveal much about what makes us uniquely human and what makes every person different from all others.
The consortium led by Washington University, University of Minnesota, and Oxford University (the WU-Minn HCP consortium) is comprehensively mapping human brain circuitry in a target number of 1200 healthy adults using cutting-edge methods of noninvasive neuroimaging. It will yield invaluable information about brain connectivity, its relationship to behavior, and the contributions of genetic and environmental factors to individual differences in brain circuitry and behavior.
Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. We conduct public opinion polling, demographic research, content analysis and other data-driven social science research. We do not take policy positions.
We analyze the social impact of digital technologies, and we study attitudes about scientific research and innovation. Our focus is on how science and technology changes affect families, communities, education, health care and medicine, civic and political life, and workers’ activities.
The National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA), located within ICPSR, is funded by the National Institute on Aging. NACDA's mission is to advance research on aging by helping researchers to profit from the under-exploited potential of a broad range of datasets.
NACDA acquires and preserves data relevant to gerontological research, processing as needed to promote effective research use, disseminates them to researchers, and facilitates their use. By preserving and making available the largest library of electronic data on aging in the United States, NACDA offers opportunities for secondary analysis on major issues of scientific and policy relevance.
The NACDA staff represents a team of professional researchers, archivists and technicians who work together to obtain, process, distribute, and promote data relevant to aging research.
PLOS requires that authors comply with field-specific standards for preparation and recording of data and select repositories appropriate to their field, for example deposition of microarray data in ArrayExpress or GEO; deposition of gene sequences in GenBank, EMBL or DDBJ; and deposition of ecological data in Dryad. Authors are encouraged to select repositories that meet accepted criteria as trustworthy digital repositories.
PLOS has identified a set of established repositories, which are recognized and trusted within their respective communities. For further information on environmental and biomedical science repositories and field standards, we suggest utilizing BioSharing; we have also created a BioSharing page of PLOS recommended data repositories. Additionally, the Registry of Research Data Repositories (Re3Data) is a full scale resource of registered repositories across subject areas. Both BioSharing and Re3Data provide information on an array of criteria to help researchers identify the repositories most suitable for their needs (licensing, certificates and standards, policy, etc.).
Authors are encouraged to select the repository most appropriate for their research. PLOS does not dictate repository selection for the data access policy. If authors use repositories with stated licensing policies, the policies should not be more restrictive than the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license. More information about the content license can be found in our licenses and copyright policy.
If no specialized community-endorsed open repository exists, institutional repositories that use open licenses permitting free and unrestricted use or public domain, and that adhere to best practices pertaining to responsible data sharing, sustainable digital preservation, proper citation, and openness are also suitable for data deposition.
