Data policies

Each institution has their own data policy and data services they have to provide to publish and/or archive data. This can create confusion as a researcher might have to follow, for the same dataset, a journal publishing requirements, their own institution policy, the funder policy, usually the Australian Research Council, and potentially follow project specific guidelines. Sometimes an institution might require you to do something which is not possible, such as publishing model data on their repository when this does not have capacity for a large dataset.

The key to navigate all these policies and services is to remember that all these reccomendation and rules have a common aim. The Australian Research Council (ARC), your own institution and/or government organisation usually want your data to be FAIR. They want you to:

• share and publish your data and code whenever possible;

• to do this ethically (see Research Code of Conduct);

• to use a repository, standards and conventions relevant to your discipline;

• and to archive essential data underpinning your PhD thesis and journal publications for 5 years.