Data in KU ScholarWorks

Publishers and funding agencies frequently require that research data be shared in a repository where it will be made publicly available and preserved for other scholars to see and to use. KU ScholarWorks, the institutional repository of the University of Kansas, can be a good place for scholars to share data that meets certain criteria.

Eligibility

  • At least one of the authors is a KU faculty member, staff member, or student
  • File size for data in KU ScholarWorks is limited to 2 GB per file; the total for one dataset with multiple files must be 10 GB or less. Files can be combined into a .zip file(s), if desired
  • Data must not contain confidential or protected information that should not be shared publicly
  • Data must be able to be openly shared, with no restrictions on who can see the data
  • Data earmarked for sharing must be in its final form. If data collection is ongoing, you may choose to share completed portions of the data at regular intervals or share completed subsets that support specific publications.

Note: KU Medical Center (KUMC) faculty, staff and students can contact the KUMC Data Concierge for assistance with data resources at KUMC.

Depositing Data in ScholarWorks

If you have research data that you wish to share in KU ScholarWorks, please contact Marianne Reed, Digital Repository & Publishing Manager at mreed@ku.edu to schedule a consultation. You will need to supply the following information:

  • The list of authors and their Open Researcher and Contributor IDs (ORCIDs), the dataset title, abstract, and keywords
  • The data file(s)
  • An optional Readme file that gives contact information and describes the dataset is highly encouraged. Please see Cornell University’s Guide to writing “readme” style metadata for guidance and download a Readme template for datasets to adapt as needed. The fields are not required, so you can remove those that do not apply to your data.

Data Management Plans and KU ScholarWorks

If you intend to use KU ScholarWorks as a repository for your data, you can indicate this in the Data Management Plan for the project. Here is some sample text about KU ScholarWorks that you can adapt as needed: 

Launched in 2005, KU ScholarWorks is the online institutional repository of the University of Kansas, containing scholarly work created by KU faculty, staff, and students.

  • Scholarly works in ScholarWorks are made publicly available for anyone in the world to read. Items in KU ScholarWorks remain the property of the copyright holder(s) and any rights held by the copyright holder (whether the author or publisher) before depositing the work in KU ScholarWorks remain unchanged by the non-exclusive license granted to KU ScholarWorks to distribute the works.
  • All items in KU ScholarWorks are assigned permanent URLs that can be used whenever the work is cited. Digital object identifiers (DOIs) for datasets will be provided upon request.
  • KU ScholarWorks provides persistent and reliable access to items in the repository and ensures their long-term preservation with the Duracloud service.
  • KU ScholarWorks adheres to standards that meet the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) that allows harvesting of the article metadata by other systems.

Services

We have services to help scholars add data to ScholarWorks:

These services are all provided free of charge to KU researchers.

Resources from KU Libraries

Guidance about best practices for research data management

Templates and guidance on writing Data Management Plans

  • DMPTool, a service of the California Digital Library
    • Create a free account using your KU email address and associate your account with the University of Kansas
    • On subsequent logins, you can sign in using KU SSO

National Institutes of Health data management and sharing policy going into effect 01/25/2023

Research sharing policies from Federal agencies that must be in place 12/31/2025

Related Resources