Submit

What is it?

After quality assurance and structured description, you might want to transfer your data from your private research domain to a shared research domain. GFBio offers support for a semi-automated, easy submission process to transfer your data to a specialized data center and answers your questions concerning metadata standards and formats, as well as terms of reuse and citation. Within the scope of good scientific practice, it is expected that data are submitted to a long-term data center to be preserved and available for discovery. GFBio offers long- term storage of your data at its collaborating data centers.

Note that submitting your data to a long-term archive does not automatically imply immediate open access to them!

During submission, you can decide between different options regarding the availability of the data:

You may select an embargo, e.g. until your journal article is published or until your project ended.
Available, but with restriction: for instance, downloadable ‘on request’. Depending e.g. on the policy of the journal, where you want to submit your article, and the options of the designated data center.
Immediately available for reuse: Downloadable, reusable and citable data.

How to do it?

Select data that will be most useful for future data users. What are the significant properties of your data? What do you want people to be able to do with your data?
Check data against spyware or malware.
Assess the metadata (technical and descriptive): ensure correct description and compatible formats. Eventually provide a cleaning protocol. Use common keywords and ontologies (preferably terms from the GFBio Terminology Service) to help other users to find your data.
Prepare the data to fulfil the archiving standards, so that they are digestible.
Choose a status for the availability of your data (e.g. immediately available/embargo/ on request).
Upload your data package. Press the submission button to finish the submission process and to get a persistent identifier for your data. A curator will double-check your data package and inform you about the submission status and potential further requirements.

Who does it?

Ideally everybody who is producing data.

Key Elements

Prepare your data for submission: metadata standard, format, check for spyware and malware
Choose a status of availability
Upload your metadata and data

GFBio Services

Data Submission

User-friendly online submission workflows (with user account and ticket system); Review of your (meta-)data upload by data curators
Personal and individual support via the GFBio Helpdesk, (e.g., with transferring large data volumes)
Example data submission templates for biodiversity, ecological and collection data as well as molecular sequence data

Useful Links

http://www.dcc.ac.uk/resources/how-guides/license-research-data (DCC Licensing data)
https://www.dataone.org/best-practices (Best-Practices-Primer)
http://arrow.monash.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/monash:7533

Describe ← → Preserve

Recommended citation:
German Federation for Biological Data (2021). GFBio Training Materials: Data Life Cycle Fact-Sheet: Data Life Cycle: Submit. Retrieved 16 Dec 2021 from https://www.gfbio.org/training/materials/data-lifecycle/submit.