Best Practices for Data Submission in Generalist Repositories: A Checklist

This Checklist has been prepared by the seven generalist repositories (Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Open Science Framework (OSF), Mendeley Data, Vivli, and Zenodo) participating in the National Institutes of Health Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (NIH GREI) for improved data submissions to generalist repositories. A data submission refers to data and any supplemental files in a repository or on a platform that provides stable identifiers for reuse, according to designated licensing permissions.

This resource is not intended to be an all-inclusive checklist of best practices for all aspects of data submissions (e.g., management and sharing) from a project’s outset, such as instantiating variable names or data dictionaries in an experimental study. In that respect, this checklist should be used in combination with other resources specific to your subject area and type of research. The guidance here may also be generally applicable to data submissions in discipline-specific repositories.

We have provided the checklist as both an interactive PDF and as an OpenDocument (.odt) text file to facilitate reuse.