Deposit Your Data
ICPSR makes your data usable, trusted, and durable.
Deposit Data Your Way
We help you meet funder and journal requirements, increase visibility and reuse, and ensure long-term preservation. You can choose to self-publish your data or let our experts curate your data for quality and documentation, assign persistent identifiers, and make it discoverable to a global research community so your data has impact long after the project ends.
What You’ll Need
- Data files + Documentation
- Basic study description (Title, Summary, Methodology)
- List of related publications
Your Data Collection After Publication
ICPSR makes it easy for people to access your data after release, and for you to track usage of your data. Some things you can expect from a fully-curated study include:
- A Study Home Page: All ICPSR studies are given a study home page. The home page provides information on how to download the study, or otherwise how to apply for access. The home page also contains the study metadata, the information about the study that users will use to determine if the study meets their needs.
- A Digital Object Identifier (DOI): All ICPSR studies receive a DOI, which is a persistent link that will always lead to your study, making it handy to use in citations or provide to colleagues. If ICPSR makes any changes to a study’s URL, we are contractually bound to both the depositor and our DOI partner, Datacite, to update the DOI so it reaches the correct study.
- Usage information: We make it easy to monitor use by providing usage information and download counts on the study homepage. The reports show how many times a dataset has been viewed and downloaded, as well as information on users’ academic status (i.e., faculty, graduate student, or undergraduate), department or field, and institutions using the data. Identities of individual users are not disclosed.
- Impact measurement: The ICPSR’s Bibliography team monitors citations of ICPSR’s studies and compiles them so that related publications are available on each study homepage. This allows you to continually measure the impact of your data publication.
- Inclusion in the Social Science Variables Database: The data in your study is searchable at the variable level, so that users can see exactly what is in the collection prior to download, and even access summary statistics.
- Online analysis: Some studies will be available for online analysis. This allows users to explore and even analyze the data without downloading it.
- Restricted access management: If your study is restricted access, ICPSR will manage access based on agreed-upon terms of use. Users can apply for access directly via ICPSR, and ICPSR will determine whether the request is appropriate.
- Long-term preservation: ICPSR is committed to long-term preservation of published studies. ICPSR maintains redundant backups to ensure that data cannot be lost and maintains checks against degradation of data. As software formats change, we will continue to make your data available and usable.