Comment on page
Prepare
Guidance on preparing to share your data
Open access data begins with a Data Management Plan (DMP). To prepare your DMP, think about all the steps in the data life cycle and your data needs at each step, such as: data types that will be gathered, file formats of those data, naming conventions, metadata formats, repositories that will be used for data sharing, and plans for long-term archive.
The Data Management Plan page has an in-depth description of the NSF data-sharing requirements and describes how to use the BCO-DMO template on the DMPTool.
A dataset submitted to BCO-DMO needs to be of sufficient quality to validate and replicate research findings. A dataset usually consists of a file containing a single data table (example formats: csv, Excel, tsv) or a collection of files that contain the same type of data, like a collection of model output files in .netcdf format or a collection of coral quadrat photos.
Descriptive Metadata: Each dataset must be accompanied by information (metadata) providing sufficient context for peer review and reuse of the data. Therefore, each dataset at BCO-DMO has its own metadata page, which describes the "who/what/where/how" information about how the data were generated.
The organization of your data can vary depending on the data type. We have specific guidance for data tables, genetic accessions, image/video datasets and Models & Code. We also have guidance for certain research programs or projects, such as GEOTRACES.
Last modified 3mo ago