Data Sharing Made Simple: How to Prepare Your Research Data for Reuse
| 31 July, 2025 | Jack Nash |
Open data is a key component of open science practices, and making your data available for others to reuse can increase the validity, reproducibility, and impact of your research. In the following blog post, we outline the benefits of data reuse and offer insight into the best practices for sharing your data with other researchers.
Benefits of data reuse
There are several significant benefits to allowing others to reuse your data. You, as an individual, can benefit from data sharing, as it can increase the discoverability of your research. By linking your open data and published research outputs, you can increase the readership of your research. In addition to this, research shows that articles with links to datasets shared in repositories generated up to 25% more citations than articles that did not share data in repositories.
Furthermore, you can increase the credibility of your work and gain opportunities to collaborate with others in your field, as researchers can access and use your data, leading to others validating your results and conclusions, and building on your discoveries.
Sharing your data can also benefit the broader research community. By sharing your data, you can help reduce research waste. When data is openly available, research becomes more efficient by removing duplication of effort from other researchers. Additionally, uploading your data to a data repository preserves the data more securely over time, as data hosted on a repository is more secure than data hosted on a website or personal files.
How to prepare your data for reuse
Write a data management plan before your project begins
Planning for managing and sharing your data can go a long way in making it easy to open your data at the end of your project. Before research begins, create a detailed data management plan (DMP). A DMP is a living document that describes how your research outputs will be generated, stored, used, and shared. The document can change and evolve throughout your research project. While most funders and publishers don’t require researchers to create a DMP, it can help ensure efficient data management and make it easier to make your data FAIR.
Prepare the data for sharing
You’ve collected your data; now it’s time to prepare it for sharing. Sometimes, there are limitations or restrictions which may prevent you from sharing your data in full. However, you may still be able to share these data provided you take the necessary precautions, e.g. protecting the confidentiality of research participants. Learn more about sensitive data sharing on HRB Open Research here.
Once you’ve determined the extent to which you can share your data, you’ll need to format your data, label your files for sharing, and prepare any additional materials needed to understand and use the data. For example, you may include a data dictionary and details of any software needed to process the data. Different disciplines and data repositories may have different standards around formatting data, so research this before you get started.
Deposit your data in a repository
A repository is an online storage infrastructure for researchers to store data, code, and other research outputs. Depositing your data in a publicly accessible, recognised repository ensures that your dataset continues to be available to both humans and machines in a usable form. Uploading data to a repository helps preserve it more securely over time than hosting it on a website. Plus, you’ll receive a persistent identifier (PID) to establish ownership and enable others to cite the data.
View our top tips on how to identify the correct repository for your data here.
Apply an open license to the data
Applying an open license to your data allows others to reuse it with minimal restrictions. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and the Creative Commons Attribution Only (CC BY) licenses are popular examples of open licenses. Both allow reusers to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon the materials in any medium or format. The critical difference is that the CC0 license has no requirements for attribution, while the CC BY license requires reusers to credit the original creator.
Make your data easy to find
Always cite your dataset in your published article and include a data availability statement. A data availability statement is a short section of text which tells the reader how, where, and under what conditions the data associated with your research can be accessed and reused. Once your research is published, some repositories allow you to add the article’s digital object identifier (DOI) to the metadata of your dataset to establish a permanent link between these two research outputs. You can also choose to publish a Data Note to maximise the potential of your research data. Data Notes are peer-reviewed articles that indicate why and how your data was collected, analysed, and validated.
If you’d like to find out more about Data Notes, visit our Data Notes resources page.
And if you’re ready to join the thousands of HRB-funded researchers already publishing their work with HRB Open Research, submit your research for publication today.