Promoting & sharing your research data

Promoting and sharing your datasets or ongoing collections is an opportunity to promote your research profile and can lead to collaborations, higher citation of your papers, future research projects, funding or opportunities to collect even more data.

In some disciplines open access to research data is becoming increasingly important and may be necessary for complying with funder or publisher requirements. In other disciplines, it may not be possible to make data available – but it may still be promoted, cited or announced to the wider community.

Research Data Australia (RDA)

Research Data Australia (RDA) is a data discovery service of the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). 

RDA allows researchers to promote their research collections and datasets in a national registry. RDA is used to promote both digital and physical data and collections.

How RDA works

RDA does not store the data itself but provides information about the data and links to access the data.

To promote your data via RDA, contact Research Librarian Cameron Barrie via [email protected] or Digital Repositories Coordinator Julie Gardner via [email protected]

RDA requires some information about you and your collaborators, the activity or project that established the data, related publications, and some details about the dataset itself.

You will also need to outline how others might use the data. For example:

  • Should they contact you first?
  • Can they download it from somewhere but acknowledge/cite you?
  • Do you have other requirements?

Take a look at the VU profile in RDA and some existing VU datasets in RDA or try searching for other data.

Data-sharing methods

We provide a number of methods at VU to assist you with sharing your research data.

Metadata – making data findable

Metadata refers to the information used to describe an item's attributes in a standardised format. For example, the title of the dataset, who created it, when it was created, and the subject of the data.

Creating sufficient structured documentation (metadata) results in data that is well-organised and documented. The data is then easy to find, interpret and re-use in the future by yourself or others.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) uniquely identifies a resource such as a journal article or a data set. It makes it is easier for future researchers to find, share and cite your data, working papers and technical reports.

Scholarly material such as journal articles and books get DOIs as part of the publishing process, and data and grey literature can obtain a DOI via the Victoria University Library. The resource must be available for others to access and should be of scholarly interest.

The Australian National Data Service has further information about DOIs.

Contact us
For more information on how to promote and share your research data contact the Research Librarian, Digital Repositories Coordinator or your College Librarian.