Research Data, Data Management & Planning: Data Repositories

A simple and effective way to share your research materials is to publish them in a repository. A repository is a storage facility (often also a preservation and curation facility) where users can upload and download their data, make it accessible and discoverable, all in an effort to fulfill grant requirements and/or support the free sharing of scholarly knowledge. Materials that are deposited into a repository should be:

• Publication-ready, or data not likely to be modified 
• Searchable and browesable 
• Retrieved or downloaded easily 
• Citeable 
• Well-documented, to facilitate understanding and re-use

A wide variety of institution-based and discipline-specific repositories exist for researchers to choose from. The repository itself should be: 

• Appropriate for the type of data you generate
• Appropriate for the audience of the repository (so they will make use of your data!)
• Open access

Below are links to the Wyoming Data Repository, as well as popular, public data repositories. The Libraries also has information on finding data in repositories for re-use and how to properly cite data in your work. 

The University of Wyoming maintains the Wyoming Data Repository (WDR), an open-access data repository. WDR holds a variety of material, including research data. The goal of the University of Wyoming’s data collections within WDR is to encourage the dissemination of research data by making these materials open access. The collection houses data created by University of Wyoming students, faculty, staff and University of Wyoming affiliates in the course of their research and registers a DOI for every dataset published. You can visit WDR here and find more specific information in our Data Repository Policy.