Sharing
In the era of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) and Open science, datasets should be made available to the public. Whenever possible, discipline-specific repositories (with or without controlled access) should be used in order to increase the FAIRness of your research outputs. If no such repository is available, there are general purpose repositories.
Finding a suitable repository type

Does your data contain personal or sensitive information that cannot be fully anonymised?
There may be cases where openly sharing data is not feasible due to ethical or confidentiality considerations. Depending on what the ethical board approving your study said about data sharing, and the level of permission granted from participants, it may still be possible to make your data accessible to authenticated users via a controlled-access repository.
See more guidelines on sharing human data
Is there a discipline specific repository for your dataset?
Research data differs greatly across disciplines. Discipline-specific repositories offer specialist domain knowledge and curation expertise for particular data types. Using a discipline-specific repository makes your data visible to others in your community.
Does your institutional repository accept data?
Many institutions offer support to their employees for managing and depositing data. Institutional repositories that accept datasets provide stewardship, helping to ensure that your dataset is preserved and accessible.
Answered no on all questions above?
General data repositories accept datasets regardless of discipline or institution. These repositories support a wide variety of file types and are particularly useful where a discipline-specific repository does not exist.
Recommended discipline-specific repositories
There are several repositories for life science data types, a selection hosted by EMBL- EBI is found below.
Genomics data
Click on the buttons below for specific information regarding suitable repositories for sharing genomics data.
- Guide for submission of metabarcoding data to ENA provided by the Swedish Biodiversity Data Infrastructure (SBDI)
- Tutorial for SARS-CoV-2 genome data submission to ENA provided by the Swedish Covid-19 Data Portal
For convenience, we have created templates for the most frequent data types and their corresponding ENA checklists. The templates come with instructions on how to do an interactive submission, via the ENA Webin Portal, but even when doing a programmatic submission, the template can be useful for collecting all necessary descriptions / metadata. Download an appropriate template, and fill in the sheets according to the instructions in the template:
European Genome-phenome Archive
Imaging data
Depending on the type of image data you have, different public repositories are available, please see the table at BioImage Archive.
Metabolomics data
MetaboLights is a database for Metabolomics experiments and derived information. The database is cross-species, cross-technique and covers metabolite structures and their reference spectra as well as their biological roles, locations and concentrations, and experimental data from metabolic experiments.
Proteomics data
The ProteomeXchange Consortium provides globally coordinated standard data submission and dissemination pipelines involving the main proteomics repositories.
Other data
For other domain-specific repositories, see e.g. ELIXIR Deposition databases, Scientific Data recommended repositories, EBI archive wizard (help to find the right repository depending on data type), or FAIRsharing (the latter can also assist in finding metadata standards suitable for describing your datasets). For datasets that do not fit into domain-specific repositories, use a general repository e.g. SciLifeLab Data Repository, Figshare and Zenodo.
How can SciLifeLab help you sharing data?
If you are a researcher at a Swedish academic institution working in the life sciences, you can get help from SciLifeLab Data Management support team. This support team can help you describe and deposit your data. Here are a few examples of the support that is offered:
- Plan data submission
- Identify suitable repositories
- Assist during the submission process when publishing data and code
- Assist in the creation of metadata records in SciLifeLab Data Repository
- Advice on what needs to be done when working with sensitive human data
- Advice on describing data with proper metadata
If you need any help connected to data submission, please contact us!
Resources
- RDMkit on Sharing Data
- RDMkit on Data publication
- The Swedish Covid-19 Data Portal on Sharing Data
- Data publication module in course Introduction to data management practices
- EBI repository wizard guides through the decision process of finding a suitable repository
- Many of the repositories at EBI have instructive videos on how to do submission as well as documentation, have a look at their YouTube playlist.