In addition to peer-review publications, there are many ways you can make sure the product of your scholarly efforts have life beyond the benchtop.

Importantly, you should do consider ways in which you may be able to combine access of your product with persistent identifiers (PIDs). One of the most common PIDs is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), but there are others to consider (20 Years of Persistent Identifiers – Which Systems are Here to Stay? Klump and Huber, 2017).

Strategies which include PIDs help others utilize your work consistently as the knowledge base grows while also allowing you (and your colleagues) understand how your work is being utilized; these are some of the foundational concepts of FAIR principles in action.

Actions for Research Sharing and Credit

Here are some ways to think about sharing (and get credit for) your efforts in academic research.

  • ORCID IDs

    Ready to get your work out there? First, get an ORCID!
    • If you're planning on publishing, it's important to establish a unique author/researcher ID
    • ORCID is an open, non-profit, interdisciplinary, global initiative that provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher
    • Through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, ORCID supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized
    • ORCIDs can also be linked to your Scopus Author ID or Web of Science Researcher Profile
    • Register for your ID - it's free, quick and easy!

  • Preprints

    Publish a version of your paper prior to formal peer review to get community input
    • A preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal
    • The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before and/or after a paper is published in a journal
    • Many publishers now allow authors to deposit a pre-print version of submitted (or to be submitted) manuscripts into institutional or organizational repositories
    • This increases impact and visibility, as it allows all readers to access the article regardless of their access to subscription resources
    • Pre-prints can be linked to peer-review publications once published, so that versioning of project information associated with the work persists and is accessible
    • See Preprints & Publishing for additional details

    Read a recent JAMA Editorial: Preprints Involving Medical Research—Do the Benefits Outweigh the Challenges?

  • Datasets 

    Share your data to increase your contribution to science
    • While we typically consider the written manuscript including figures and detail as the currency of academic discourse, the growth, development distribution and utility of data sets is quickly gathering speed as a competitive tender
    • Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone—subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and share-alike (Open Data Handbook)
    • Open scientific data focuses on the primary research data published within or alongside research papers.
    • Data type, size and academic discipline will all influence what, how and where your data may be best cataloged for access
    • Sharing your data has been shown to gives more credibility to an article's results, and also contribute to citation counts, which in turn leads to increasing one's reputation and contribution to science (The citation advantage of linking publications to research data)
    • There are many options for publicly sharing data sets as a condition of publication, including government-sponsored repositories, disciplinary repositories, and general discipline repositories
    • Explore relevant Data Repositories to help share your datasets

  • Code

    Making your code available can aid reproducibility of research

  • Protocols

    Bring structure to your research by sharing protocols & methods
    • Simply sharing data and code is not enough to allow for scientific reproducibility, resulting in a rising focus on the importance of reporting detailed methods
    • Research papers and protocol organization in labs often lack detailed instructions for repeating experiments
    • Sharing experimental protocols and methodologies allows researchers to efficiently develop, reproduce, reuse, and publish research methods
    • protocols.io is an open access resource that allows researchers to create step-by-step, interactive, and dynamic protocols (see Collaborative Tools). Protocols.io Carbon is freely available for qualifying HMS, HDSM, and SPH constituents.

  • Reagents

    Use repositories to organize, document, and share reagents
    • Researchers may waste time, money, resources when reagents are recreated
    • Reagent repositories and databases help support tracking created reagents, validating all reagents in the lab, labeling and storing reagents, and legally distributing reagents to interested researchers
    • Options include:

  • Training Materials

    Consider sharing educational curricula
    • Are you creating educational curricula? Are you creating training materials that others in your field are using?
    • If you are, consider hosting your materials on a stable platform that will maintain persistent URLs and associated PIDs
    • OER Commons is a public digital library of open educational resources. Search and discover open educational resources and other freely available instructional materials.
    • Open Repositories such as Zenodo, figshare and the Open Science Framework are also ideal for this type of sharing