Where to publish scientific outputs?

Datasets

Once you have collected and prepared your citizen science data to follow FAIR principles and a standard format for your discipline, you need to publish them. Some people attach data as supplementary information with a peer-reviewed paper; as a link on their project or personal websites; or via a general cloud storage provider like Google Drive or Dropbox. However, the former option reduces the visibility and accessibility of the data to only those who finds and reads the paper. The latter options are ephemeral and unreliable: Websites go offline or move, and non-specialised cloud providers might terminate accounts or delete files if the account owner forgets to pay for storage. Sometimes, links simply stop working. Fortunately, there are dedicated data publishing platforms designed for the long-term archiving and preservation of your project’s valuable data. Here are just a few possibilities for you to consider.

Zenodo is a prominent general-use repository for publishing open science data from any discipline. It is used by researchers from academics to citizen scientists. Their data submission form guides you in including the metadata to accompany your dataset. Zenodo is directly funded by the European Union and operated by CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), famous for their need to archive extremely large datasets.

The Open Science Framework (OSF), operated by the Center for Open Science, has practically all the functionality of Zenodo. However, OSF also provides some collaborative features that may be useful to your team.

Both Zenodo and OSF would assign a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to your published dataset. A DOI, similar to the International Standard Book Number (ISBN), is a unique and permanent alphanumeric string which is used to identify any published digital object, such as a dataset. Not only does a DOI help others when they cite your dataset, but it also provides a permanent link which keeps your data accessible indefinitely.

To find data repositories specific to your field, the Registry of Research Data Repositories (re3data) is a good place to start.

Other files

The repositories we introduced earlier, such as Zenodo or OSF, are designed to not just archive data, but also other open science outputs. This may include presentations, video and audio recordings, images, text, software source code, hardware design files, or just about anything that can be captured in digital form. If you are an academic researcher, you might also be interested in publishing your open science outputs to Research Ideas and Outcomes. This journal aims to publish all parts of the research lifecycle with open peer review.

Another valuable repository for scientific outputs is the Wikimedia Commons. This website is often confused with Wikipedia, but is in fact an independent sibling project. Material of any media type - text, video, audio, or images - can be published to the Wikimedia Commons as long as there is some scientific or educational value. Wikimedia Commons is not for publishing datasets, but could be used to archive items such as a guide to astrophotography for citizen scientists; a video introduction to your project; or representative recordings of bird songs by different species.