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Open Research: Open Research Data

What is Open Data?

Open data is data that is:

  • Freely available to download in a reusable form. Large or complex data may be accessible via a service or facility that enables access in-situ or the compilation of sub-sets
  • Licensed with minimal restrictions to reuse
  • Well described with provenance and reuse information provided
  • Available in convenient, modifiable and open formats
  • Managed by the provider on an ongoing basis

Visit the Australian National Data Service for more information on the value of open research data.

FAIR Principles

The Australian Research Data Commons describes FAIR as a set of principles designed to support knowledge discovery and innovation both by humans and machines, support data and knowledge integration, promote sharing and reuse of data, be applied across multiple disciplines and help data and metadata to be ‘machine readable’, support new discoveries through the harvest and analysis of multiple datasets and outputs. However translating the FAIR principles into practice will vary for each discipline.

Findable data includes:

  • Assigning a persistent identifier
  • Having metadata to describe the data
  • Making sure it is findable through discovery portal

For more information visit the Australian Research Data Commons FAIR Data page.

Accessible data includes:

  • Making data open using a standardised protocol, unless it is sensitive data
  • If it’s not able to be open, there should be clarity and transparency around the conditions governing access and reuse

For more information visit the Australian Research Data Commons FAIR Data page.

Interoperable data includes:

  • using community accepted languages, formats and vocabularies in the data and metadata
  • Metadata should reference and describe relationships to other data and metadata through using identifiers

For more information visit the Australian Research Data Commons FAIR Data page.

Reusable data should:

  • Maintain its initial richness
  • Have a clear machine readable licence and information on how the data was formed
  • Have discipline specific data and metadata that give contextual information to allow reuse

For more information visit the Australian Research Data Commons FAIR Data page.

Publish Your Data

Some benefits of publishing your research data include:

  • Increase opportunity for future collaboration.
  • Enable increased impact. 
  • Expand the reach of your research.
  • The ARC support researchers to deposit data arising from their research projects in publicly accessible repositories.
  • The NHMRC support researchers to disseminate and share their research data through publicly accessible databases or repositories.  

Publish your data by creating a Data Publication record in the Data Management Dashboard.

Request a DOI for your dataset and liaise  with the library to publish a metadata record describing your dataset to NOVA, the institutional repository and Research Data Australia (RDA).

Visit the Data Management Toolkit for a detailed guide from planning through to publishing your data, or contact the library at researchdata@newcastle.edu.au.

Data Management Dashboard

The Data Management Dashboard is an online tool for your Data Management Plans (DMPs), your Data Archival records (tell the university about your data and its location at the end of your project) and online services to publish your datasets. 

The Data Management Dashboard covers:
Planing your Research Project

  • Online Data Management Plan (DMP) tool
  • Meets the requirements for the Research Code, UON Guidelines and funder DM statements e.g. ARC Discovery Grants
  • Easy to use web forms
  • Update, edit, revisit anytime
  • PDF export of your DMP

Managing Data

  • Create a record of your archival dataset at the end of your project
  • Auto populates information from existing DMP
  • Describe your data and record its location

Publishing and Sharing your Data

  • Publish and share data 
  • Auto populates information from existing archival record
  • Auto assign a DOI persistent identifier to enable your data to be cited
  • Apply Creative Commons licencing to your data
  • Publishes your data record to the NOVA Open Access Repository and Research Data Australia

For more detailed information on managing research data, visit the Data Management Toolkit.