Open your data

University of Jyväskylä aims for as open research data as possible. Datasets should be as open as possible while being as closed as necessary. Researchers together with experts from Open Science Centre are the best experts here to asses what parts of the data can be published.  At least metadata of all datasets - even those that remain closed - should be always published.

It is worthwhile to take publishing data and metadata is into account and planned from as early stage as possible. This will save considerable effort later on. Datasets will be published as well-descripted, well-organized datasets that ensure (re)usability and interoperability of the data. Publishing platforms are selected in such way that availability and findability won't be issues. This ensures that FAIR principles are taken into account.

Open data published by JYU can be found from university's JYX repository. In addition to that, there is plenty of published data from JYU e.g. in Kielipankki, Tietoarkisto and international repositories.

Benefits for publishing research data?

Opening your own data makes the world a better place, but it also directly benefits your research.

• You will find your own datasets faster and more reliably in the future for re-use - no matter how many years, new computers, new working institutions, or even new continents, you've gone through in between.
• Was it ever difficult to remember what this or that column in an old dataset of your own actually means? Or decide who deserves a co-authorship in new research using old data? Your own research is easier and meets higher quality standards, when that metadata too is archived from the beginning and published.
• Your research gets cited through datasets too, and you are easier to find = new contacts in your field of research, more name recognition, more opportunities to do interesting and rewarding science.
• Published datasets are already a significant item in evaluation of researcher merit, in many funding and research institutions. The weight of this contribution to science when awarding grants and positions is only going to increase in the future. Be in the vanguard and open everything you can: you will gain a competitive edge in funding applications and in other situations where your research merit is judged. For example when you apply for tenure in 2020's!
• Most importantly: your research's chance to impact the world grows, a lot.

You can get started in publishing your data right away, even before you've collected the data

Keeping metadata and dataset's documentation up-to-date is key part of opening the data. This can be taken care of right from planning stage to storing documentation on methods, structure and contents of the dataset and other relevant information in /DOCUMENTATION -subfolder under the dataset's main folder. General metadata should be kept in Converis research information system's Research data section.

Creating the metadata entry does not mean the dataset is immediately published, you can keep the entry private or only shared among your team, until you are ready to open it to the world. But the initiated metadata entry enables early-stage support from University of Jyväskylä in your data management issues. You can use Converis to request publishing the ready metadata or whole dataset in JYX.

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact researchsupport-osc@jyu.fi