Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data

Ethan P White; Elita Baldridge; Zachary T Brym; Kenneth J Locey; Daniel J McGlinn; Sarah R Supp

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.7v1

Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data

Ethan P White ¹, Elita Baldridge¹, Zachary T Brym¹, Kenneth J Locey², Daniel J McGlinn¹, Sarah R Supp¹

1 Department of Biology and the Ecology Center, Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States

2 Department of Biology, Utah State University, Logan, UT, United States

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.7v1

Published: 2013-04-11
Accepted: 2013-04-11

Subject Areas: Computational Biology, Ecology, Evolutionary Studies, Computational Science
Keywords: data sharing, data reuse, repository, license, data format

Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Cite this article: White EP, Baldridge E, Brym ZT, Locey KJ, McGlinn DJ, Supp SR. 2013. Nine simple ways to make it easier to (re)use your data. PeerJ PrePrints 1:e7v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.7v1

Abstract

Sharing data is increasingly considered to be an important part of the scientific process. Making your data publicly available allows original results to be reproduced and new analyses to be conducted. While sharing your data is the first step in allowing reuse, it is also important that the data be easy understand and use. We describe nine simple ways to make it easy to reuse the data that you share and also make it easier to work with it yourself. Our recommendations focus on making your data understandable, easy to analyze, and readily available to the wider community of scientists.