Data Repositories

For UW-Madison researchers who need to publish their research data to comply with funding agency or publisher requirements, UW-Madison offers two solutions: Dryad and MINDS@UW. Both services will make your data publicly accessible, provide DOIs upon deposit, and steward your data long-term into the future. More information on both services and their differences are included below.

Other repositories such as ICPSR, Dataverse, Open Science Framework, or Figshare may also be good fits for your data. You can also explore re3data to identify other repositories.

Still not sure which is the right option for you? Interested in sharing your data in another repository? Reach out to the RDS team. We can talk through your data needs and other possible repository solutions.

Dryad

UW-Madison is now a member of Dryad, an open-access data repository, where you can now publish and share your research data for free with the institutional membership. Dryad was started by a community of researchers and is used worldwide to meet funder and publisher mandates for data publication.

Is your research data right for Dryad?

  • You are a UW-Madison researcher with a NetID
  • The total dataset for deposit is 300GB or less
  • The data is able to be open access and:
    • Is not sensitive
    • Does not contain personally identifiable human subject information
  • The data is able to be licensed with the Creative Commons Zero waiver (CC0) (see Dryad’s post for more information)

Dryad is also a great option for those who are working with a publisher who has a Dryad integration. To learn more about the benefits of Dryad, read our blog post.

Ready to get started? 

Dryad requires an ORCID iD to login. Once you have an ORCID iD:

  • Log in using your ORCID credentials,
  • You’ll then be prompted to authorize the connection between  your Dryad and ORCID accounts
  • Finally, you’ll be prompted to select UW-Madison from a drop-down menu and use your netID to associate your account with our institution
  • You’re now ready to deposit

MINDS@UW

MINDS@UW, the University’s open access institutional repository, is designed to gather, distribute, and preserve digital materials related to the University of Wisconsin’s research mission. Content may include research papers and reports, pre-prints and post-prints, datasets and other born-digital or digitized primary research materials.

Is your research data right for MINDS?

  • You are affiliated with UW-Madison
  • Total data deposit is currently decided on a case-by-case basis
  • The data is able to be open access and:
    • Is not sensitive
    • Does not contain personally identifiable human subject information

MINDS@UW is a great option for those with larger datasets or those who would like to have a shared collection for their publications, data, and other scholarly outputs within the same repository.

Ready to get started? 

Contact the MINDS@UW team to get started. After a consultation about your needs, the team will assist you in setting up a collection, provide some guidance on required data documentation and formats, and then assign you permissions for deposit in the repository.