Jump to Publish Research Artifacts Resources
Making research outputs available, accessible, and understandable is an important aspect of research transparency, reproducibility, and open science.
Once your research is completed, how do you disseminate your research? How will the project data and findings be shared and stored for future use? How will your data be easily found and understood by an outside audience? What about the software you created or the scripts you used to clean and analyze your data?
UW-Madison has a number of resources available to help you.
Preserve and share data & code
Research Data Services
Research Data Services (RDS) is a free resource for anyone on the UW-Madison campus that provides consultations, best practice information, and education and training on research data management and sharing. They help make your data citable, open, and publicly accessible.
Contact RDS via their contact form.
- Required to share your data publicly? RDS can help identify appropriate solutions for sharing and preserving data that comply with funding agency and publisher policies.
- RDS can provide guidance and resources for preparing your data for sharing to facilitate long-term access and reuse.
- RDS can help with data management plans that require identifying a repository or public access solution.
Sharing data through a repository
A data repository can both archive your data long-term while making it publicly accessible to comply with publisher or funder requirements.
It is always best to pick a disciplinary data repository if available. However, if one is not available or it is not a good long-term solution, there are also institutional repositories like UW’s MINDS@UW or generalist repositories like Dryad and Zenodo.
Research Data Services provides guidance on selecting an appropriate repository on their website. You can also contact them for assistance.
Sharing Code
While GitHub and the campus supported GitLab service are common solutions for sharing code associated with a research project, the platform itself is not really built to preserve code long-term. Best practice is to archive the plain text code in a repository alongside your data or utilize a repository that has an association with GitHub, such as Zenodo which archives a version of your GitHub repository alongside deposited data. The Data Science Hub can assist with questions about GitHub and has trainings available on using Git.
Research Data Services provides further guidance on archiving code on their website. You can also contact them for assistance.
Share Publications & Other Research Outputs
UW Libraries
The UW-Madison Libraries are committed to the discovery, access, and long-term preservation of its own collections, and of the intellectual output of the University. The Libraries offer a number of services related to digital curation and preservation.
- Need help with publishing? Librarians are available to consult with researchers on topics relating to copyright and author’s rights, finding where to publish, measuring and maximizing impact, and many other topics.
- MINDS@UW is the University of Wisconsin’s open access institutional repository for scholarly outputs including datasets, pre-prints, theses, technical reports, conference proceedings, or other outputs. MINDS@UW can make data publicly available while preserving it at a persistent, citable URL. DOIs are available if needed for well-curated and described datasets deposited in MINDS@UW.
- The UW Digital Collections, curated primarily by library staff and project partners, contains nearly three million digital objects of all kinds: research and instructional images, digitized books, archival materials, audio and video. Contact the UW Digital Collections Center with a suggested project proposal for inclusion in the UW Digital Collections.
For more information, please email dspace-help[at]library.wisc.edu for inquiries regarding MINDS and use this form for inquiries regarding UW Digital Collections.
Public Access to Publications
The Public Access Service can be used to make sure that you are following the correct policies when providing public access to publications that result from federally funded research. The Public Access Team is available to answer questions, and to offer consultations and presentations.
Discovery Disclosure
Your discovery of any new process, composition or device, or an improvement to an existing process, composition or device, may be an invention. University policy and federal statutes require all UW–Madison faculty, staff and students to disclose it to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), regardless of the monies that funded the research. All Morgridge Institute researchers also must disclose to WARF. The best time to submit an invention is before any public disclosure.
Get Credit
Researcher profiles and IDs can help you differentiate your work from other authors with similar names and make it easier for others to locate your work online. Establishing a unique researcher identity is an important step to improving your research impact.
There are a variety of options for creating a unique identity. ORCID and ResearcherID are two more highly used tools that can create a unique identifier for an author. You can link your account in these tools to each other, as well as to other researcher profiling platforms like Google Scholar, ResearchGate, or Academia.edu for greater impact.