When deciding what to deposit it is important to prioritize data that are unique or vulnerable, historically significant or valuable, and support your published (or soon to be published) research. You should also consider the data sharing requirements of your funding or publisher.

The following are general guidelines to consider when deciding what research data to deposit in a dataverse:

For more information and guidelines see "Selecting data for preservation" and Selecting-for-Deposit-to-SDR by Stanford Libraries Data Management Services.

UNBC is a member of Borealis, the Dataverse Repository, allowing all UNBC researchers to deposit data for discovery and sharing. This platform can accept all file formats and allows researchers to maintain control of their data, setting permissions for access along a spectrum from publicly available to available only by requesting the data from the researcher.

This platform will allow you to easily comply with any data sharing requirements of grants or journals in which you are publishing your results, creates a DOI for your dataset automatically, and allows you to view metrics to measure the impact of your data, including views and downloads.

Depositing Data

To deposit data, you will need to create an account using the sign-up button.

See the Borealis guide on Adding a New Dataset, Editing Datasets, Datasets and Restricted File Permissions, and Publishing a Dataset or watch the following video on publishing a dataset:

View more Dataverse Video Tutorials

UBC has also created some excellent step by step guides here:

• Data deposit quick guide
• Extended data deposit guide

The Federated Research Data Repository (FRDR) collects research datasets originating from researchers affiliated with Canadian institutions and makes them freely available.

Only Principal Investigators or their appointed designate may deposit data in FRDR. Principal Investigators must be faculty at a Canadian institution who can sponsor designates to submit content on their behalf. Designates may include external collaborators, graduate students, non-research staff, postdoctoral fellows, research assistants, researchers, undergraduate students, visiting faculty, etc.

FRDR can also provide specialized service to research groups producing large amounts of data.

UNBC data repository	Yes, UNBC dataverse	No
Maximum File Size	2.5 GB or smaller	Any size
Location of Data Servers	Canada, local	Canada
Creates DOIs	Yes	Yes
File types accepted	All	All
Ability to update files and keep older versions	Yes, updating datasets is easy and users can track and download older versions of your data.	Updating difficult and only the most recent version kept
Control access*	Permissions may be set at the collection-level, dataset-level, or file-level	Temporary embargo available but all files must eventually be made openly available.
Ability to collaborate with research team	Yes; "Dataverse has a number of features that will support collaborative research. You can track file versions, describe datasets and provide version notes, control access to files within a team easily, assign different access roles such as ‘admin’ ‘contributor’ or ‘curator’ at the Dataverse (collection) or dataset level."	No; "FRDR is a repository for the publication of research data. It does not support active research data management functionality."
Specialized or discipline specific metadata	General and specialized citation and description fields for Social Sciences, Geosciences, Health and Life Sciences, and Astronomy	Default, general standards for data description with the ability to request custom metadata fields and discipline specific web forms.
Discoverability	UNBC Library General Search, DataCite, FRDR, Google, ORCID	UNBC Library General Search, DataCite, Google, OpenAIRE

*Neither repository option is suitable for sensitive research data at this time.

Source: Portage Network, & Canadian Association of Research Libraries. (June 2019). Repository Options in Canada: A Portage Guide. Portage Network. https://zenodo.org/records/3966349

Other Options

There are hundreds of research data repositories across Canada and thousands around the world. If the above options do not meet your needs, talk to your colleagues about discipline/subject specific data repositories and browse the Registry of Research Repositories at re3data.org.