Managing Your Data

There are several resources at UMass Amherst for you to store and share your data! 

The Data Repository at ScholarWorks can store your openly accessible data. As a service of the Libraries, sharing data in ScholarWorks is free of charge to all UMass researchers. Learn more about depositing data at ScholarWorks, or email us if you have more questions.

The Data Working Group can advise you on storing large data sets. UMass Amherst has partnerships with a handful of groups that specialize in long-term archiving for large datasets. Please email us to learn more. 

Deposit your work with ScholarWorks 

The Data Repository @ ScholarWorks offers long-term storage and public access to the data and datasets produced by scholars at UMass Amherst. 

You can submit your own data and add contextual details to help others find your work. Data and other materials in ScholarWorks are findable by all major search engines.  

To improve findability, accessibility, and reuse of your data, we ask that all data depositors also submit a readme file with their work. Readme files are typically text files that contain general information about your work, including contact information, variable definitions, and more. Note that data deposits without readme files will not be approved until a readme file is completed. We offer a readme file template, or if your discipline has more rigorous and detailed standards, you can use your own. 

If you have questions about depositing your data with ScholarWorks, or with any other repository, please email the Data Working Group.

Boilerplate language for using the Data Repository @ ScholarWorks in your grant proposal

Feel free to use the language below when filling out grants that require dissemination and sharing of data. Please note that the Data Repository can only accept data that is openly available - we are unable to provide restricted access to data.

A data sharing plan will be used to store and make publicly accessible the data beyond the life of the project. The data will be deposited into the Data Repository @ ScholarWorks, https://scholarworks.umass.edu/data. The University of Massachusetts Amherst University Libraries’ hosted institutional data repository is an open access platform for dissemination and long-term sharing of university research data. In addition, the Data Repository @ ScholarWorks provides long-term storage for data files, metadata and maintains persistent DOIs for data sets, facilitating data citations. In accordance to Data Repository @ ScholarWorks policies, the (deidentified, if applicable) data will be accompanied by the appropriate documentation, metadata, and code to facilitate reuse and provide the potential for interoperability with similar data sets.

If you need further assistance with language for a grant, please see Florida International University’s boilerplate library. For more help, contact the Data Working Group.