Publishing Research Data on the Publication Server

1. Log in to the publication server and create a new item.
2. Select as item type
• Dataset for a collection of quantitative data (collected, measured, or simulated data or images).
• Experiment for a description of an experiment (e.g., description of the experimental setup, sketches, lab books).
• Image for one ore more image files.
• Video for one ore more video files.
• Audio for one ore more audio files.
• Software for scripts, source code and the like.
• Other for something that is not covered by the other categories.
3. In the "Details" section, enter the metadata for your entry. Mandatory fields are creators (authors), contact Email address, title, and date (at least the year).
• As creators, list all those persons who were directly involved in generating the data.
• At Superordinate Entry, you can link the current (research data) entry with a publication that is based on this data. Enter the item ID of the superordinate entry and press "Lookup". (You can find the item ID of an entry in the table at the landing page, or as part of the URL: http://epub.uni-regensburg.de/12345/.)
4. The "Status" section should contain
• Status: "Unpublished" if you didn't publish your data elsewhere, e.g., in another repository. Even if you have published an article with graphs visualizing your data, the raw data itself is still unpublished.
• Refereed: "No, this document will not be refereed" should be the standard value for research data, since the data itself usually is not refereed during the peer review process of a publication.
5. Select your institutional affiliation (e.g, your working group) and your subject area (up to three).
6. In the "Upload" section you can upload one or more files. Either select a file from your computer, or enter a URL to the file. Please note the section about reasonable file formats! If your dataset contains many files, you may combine them into a ZIP archive.
7. You can enter individual metadata for each file by pressing "Show options" at the respective files. This is particularly helpful if your entry contains several separate files. In these options, you can
• enter a short description that will be shown next to the file,
• determine who is allowed to download the file ("Visible to"). See below for more information.
8. In the "Deposit" section, press "Deposit Item Now". Your entry then is moved to the review workarea of the publication server, will be reviewed by formal criteria by a library employee and then published to the live archive.

For long term preservation, you should choose file formats which are, presumably, still readable in ten years, i.e., no formats that require a specific version of a specific (proprietary) software. For example, you could archive interview transcripts in text or PDF format instead of MS Word files, or measurement data in text or CSV format instead of Origin files.