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Lakehead University and LU Library

Research Data Management

Services and tools available to researchers for managing data

Choosing a repository

Data repositories enable researchers to safely store and share their own data and find data collected by others. Several tools exist to aid researchers in finding appropriate repositories.

  • Borealis is a data sharing platform free for researchers at Canadian research institutions. It meets the deposit requirements of the Tri-Agency and many leading journals. Here at Lakehead, we administer an instance of Borealis (Lakehead Dataverse) and can guide you in deposit processes. See below for more details.
  • FRDR (Federated Research Data Repository) came online in 2018 - it provides a national data discovery site for Canadian researchers and is capable of ingesting and preserving large file sizes.
  • re3data (Registry of Research Data Repositories) is a global registry of data repositories for many academic disciplines
  • A list of recommended data repositories can be found via PLOS ONE - many other publishers will provide lists of recommended repositories
  • Fairsharing.org site includes a list of databases along with policies, standards, etc.

Borealis (Formerly Scholars Portal Dataverse)

Borealis is a data sharing platform free for researchers at Canadian research institutions. It meets the deposit requirements of the Tri-Agency and many leading journals. Here at Lakehead, we administer an instance of Borealis (Lakehead Dataverse) and can guide you in deposit processes. See below for more details.

Prepare for deposit

Metadata describes the characteristics of other data. It enables researchers to find and use data. It includes:

  • The name of the data creator(s) or collector(s)
  • The date and time the data was collected
  • The format the data is in
  • An overview of the research project (i.e. methods, materials, participants, etc)
  • Keywords that describe the data contents
  • Information about where the data is or will be stored and who can access it 
  • The language the data is presented in

Because research data is so diverse, specific disciplines follow different metadata standards. The following resources are designed to help you apply the appropriate metadata to your data set, preparing it for submission to a repository.