Why publish research data?

Data publishing is public disclosure of the research data you have collected. It differs from publishing a journal article, which often only includes the results of the data (instead of the actual data). It is about making research data findable and reusable for others for future research and researchers.

The WUR data policy requires that all research data underlying a scientific publication must be preserved for at least 10 years. A way of fulfilling this requirement is by publishing data in a repository. Additionally, more and more funders and publishers now require you to publish the research data on which your research articles are based. Besides complying with funder policies and the WUR data policy, publishing data in a data repository has several advantages:

  • Data are kept for the long-term and, when depositing data in open file formats, the data remains accessible (see File Formats).
  • A data licence is applied, acknowledging data rights and setting terms of use (see Licences).
  • A data repository assigns a persistent identifier (e.g. Digital Object Identifier (DOI), accession number, etc.) to the data, ensuring that the data can be found, cited and linked to your publication(s). See for more information the website from the Digital Curation Centre: How to Cite Datasets and Link to Publications. Note: when publishing as supplementary material to a journal article, the copyright may be transmitted to the journal / publisher. We, therefore, strongly advise to publish research data in a data repository.
  • The visibility of data increases to other users. For example, when registering data in Pure, it becomes visible in Research@WUR and findable in various search engines such as Google or DataCite Commons.