Research Data Support – a service from Springer Nature

Open data promotes reproducibility and helps papers get cited up to 50% more!

However, many researchers lack the time and knowledge to share their data properly. In a survey of 7,000 academics, 46% cited difficulties with organizing their data, 33% didn’t know which repository to use and 26% felt they didn’t have time.*

Our Research Data Support service offers a solution

• Before the service: a researcher’s data might be stored as an Excel file on their desktop or hard-drive. Other than the researcher, no one may even know that the data exist.
• Submitting to the service: your researchers can upload their data files through our secure and easy-to-use submission portal.
• Curation and publishing: our research data experts curate the data and metadata, and the data are published in the Springer Nature figshare repository and linked to the researchers’ papers (see example below).
• The results: your institution’s research becomes more visible and you comply with funder and journal data sharing requirements.

Institutions already benefiting from Research Data Support include The Wellcome Trust, City, University of London and Breast Cancer Research Foundation (BCRF).

“I had a really great experience using Springer Nature Research Data Support. The process was straightforward, and the team were very helpful…I opted to use the service because I wanted to make sure that the data accompanying my paper are as accessible as possible, and this presents an ideal way.” Dr Samantha Giles, Research Fellow, University of Oxford (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23654)

Example dataset from Research Data Support:

Below is an example of a researcher’s dataset that we published in the Springer Nature figshare repository. The annotations highlight key features added by our research data experts, such as the comprehensive description and meaningful title. Our data experts also added a data availability statement and data citation on the published paper, linking the paper to the figshare dataset.

The dataset in figshare

The paper, published in Nature, with a data availability statement and data citation:

The published paper in Nature

^{*Stuart, D., Baynes, G., Hrynaszkiewicz, I., Allin, K., Penny, D., Lucraft, M., & Astell, M. (2018). Whitepaper: Practical challenges for researchers in data sharing.}