Open Materials

File Naming

File names should be informative and useful for both humans and machines. The more meaningful the name the easier it will be for others to understand what the file contains and how it should be used.

Choose machine readable names

• Use deliberate deliminators: e.g. using “_” and “-” to deliminate units of metadata in the file names; don’t use spaces, punctuation, capital letters or special characters

Choose human readable names

• Choose names that explain the content; choose short names

Choose names that use default ordering (when not using version control)

• Number or date the versions so they can be ordered
• Put something numeric first (e.g. date or version number)
• Use YYYY-MM-DD for dates

Organizing Files

Be consistent throughout the research process

• Create a project directory and give it an informative name. Create and name subdirectories (components) with informative names and locations.

Use one directory for one project

 

Licensing

Planning to license your data should be a part of any project that will be shared. If you share your research without a license you are not making clear how you wish the research to be used which might prevent it being used the way you intend.

Learn your obligations

Check for funder obligations

Check for data repository obligations

Check for local policy or institutional obligations

Consider multiple-licensing if your obligations are non-exclusive

Evaluate standard licences

Evaluate what Attribution conditions you would like

• If you would like to require that those reusing your research give you credit, you should use an Attribution condition.
• In Creative Commons licensing, if you do not want to require attribution, you should consider making your research public domain or CC0 (see below).
  

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See also here and here.

 

Consider public domain

Evaluate whether you need control on reuse

Evaluate how to maximize reuse and impact of your research

Consider using community norms rather than legal measures to control reuse

Get Information about Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/index.php

 

Research Data Management (RDM) and the Law

DCC Checklist on Legal Aspects of RDM

1. Protection of Personal Data
2. Freedom of Information (FOI) and Environmental Information (EIR)
3. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) in Data and Databases
4. Data Sharing, Licensing and Re-use
5. Legal Considerations of Cloud Service Provision
   

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Helpful Tools

Here are some useful tools for sharing different kinds of materials

Reagents

A reagents is a substance, compound or mixture that can be added to a system in order to create a chemical or other reaction. Reagents can be deposited with repositories like Addgene or ATCC to make them easily accessible to other researchers. License your materials so they can be reused by other researchers.

Protocols
A protocol describes a formal or official record of scientific experimental observations in a structured format. Deposit virtual protocols for citation, adaptation, and reuse using Protocols.io.  

Notebooks, containers, software, and hardware
Share notebooks with Open services such as mybinder that allow for public viewing and execution of the entire notebook on shared resources. Containers and notebooks can be shared with Rocker, Code Ocean or RStudio Cloud.

A Quick Guide to Software Licensing for the Scientist-Programmer can be found here.

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Badges to Acknowledge Open Practices

The Open Materials badge is earned by making publicly available the components of the research methodology needed to reproduce the reported procedure and analysis.

Criteria

1.  Digitally-shareable materials are publicly available on an open-access repository. The materials must have a persistent identifier and be provided in a format that is time-stamped, immutable, and permanent (e.g., university repository, a registration on the Open Science Framework, or an independent repository at www.re3data.org).

2.  Infrastructure, equipment, biological materials, or other components that cannot be shared digitally are described in sufficient detail for an independent researcher to understand how to reproduce the procedure.

3.  Sufficient explanation for an independent researcher to understand how the materials relate to the reported methodology.