Sharing Your Research Work#
In order to make sure that (most) research outputs are available to everyone interested in analysing or reusing them, let’s take some time to learn about how to share them. Science can only progress when we build on each other’s work. Different digital research outputs or research objects, such as data, software and code, protocols, reagents, and hardware, can be shared as open results on the web. They should come with specific information such as licenses, documentation and source code (repository, online index or archive).
Sharing online is not enough - you should make sure that knowledge discovery and navigation process is clearly described. You need to make sure that your research objects are Findable, Accesible, Interoperable and Reusable. This is referred to as FAIR Principles that provides guidelines to improve the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability of digital assets; all of which support research reproducibility.
This aspect is already considered when developing your Data Management Plan (DMP) (see Data Management Plan). Therefore, it is important to revisit your DMP to make sure that the guidelines are applied when making your results available. You can learn more about this in a chapter on making data FAIR).
Collecting your Research#
Once you are done with your research you may want to collect all the digital parts of your project in one place. This is called a research compendium. Publishing your paper along with a research compendium allows the full extent of your research: from the design of the project, through the data recollection and analysis and the resulting outputs.
This has endless advantages. It makes your work shareable and reproducible, others can build upon it and gives you more visibility.
You can read how to set up your research compendia, this chapter.
Add License to Research Outputs#
Even if you got a license at the beginning of the project you need to think about it again when sharing your outputs and final results - this allows people to have the information about how your research should be reused and shared.
If you want more information about how to choose and add a license to your project you can check the Licensing Chapter.
Receive Citations#
All this hard work will have its reward. Having published all your research from the design to the results adds visibility to your work and more opportunity to get credit.
Not only can your results can be cited, but your methods and protocols can be reused and your design can be shared.
Read this chapter on ORCID for more information about how you can collect different research outputs in one place using ORCID and highlight them to get fair credit for your work.