Deposit Data

NACDA welcomes and encourages deposits of digital data on aging.

Deposits are made using a secure form to describe the data collection and upload content. Users must have or create a Researcher Passport, or Google account to sign in to the deposit form.

NACDA has two options for sharing your data!

Use this decision tree (pdf) to determine which option best meets your needs — NACDA curated or the NACDA Open Aging Repository (NACDA-OAR).

NACDA

NACDA offers curation services as staff obtain, process, preserve, and disseminate electronic data to researchers for secondary analysis in aging research. After a data collection is deposited with NACDA, the data and documentation will be reviewed, enhanced, and made available in several widely used formats, including ASCII, tab-delimited (for use with Excel), SAS, SPSS, and Stata. Documentation is provided as PDF.

Deposit to NACDA

The NACDA-Open Aging Repository (NACDA-OAR) offers free self-publishing options for gerontological researchers to share their research projects. Data collections published in NACDA-OAR are immediately distributed as-is for research use in the same condition and format submitted by the depositor.

Deposit to NACDA-OAR

The main idea is to provide complete data, documentation, and metadata (study level and variable level) so that your data can be easily reused and replicated. Preparing your data will help reduce the time it takes to fully curate it, increase secondary usage, ensure consistency in use across statistical packages, and ultimately stand the test of time against changes in technology and software. How do you ensure your materials are “complete”? What should your deposit include? Review our Data Sharing Best Practices for NIA Funded Research. (pdf)

Need help assessing how to prepare your materials or address data confidentiality? Please contact us .

Review our Depositor Agreement and Depositor Checklist (based on best practices) for more details.

For deposits that involve physical materials, please email icpsr-help@umich.edu .

For deposits to the main, curated NACDA archive, the NACDA team reviews the materials to ensure the deposit is complete; we will reach out to you about any questions we have. Then we send the materials to the Curation team, where a data curator uses the data and documentation to build a study description, enhance, convert, and quality-check the data, approve the data collection for distribution on the ICPSR website, and archive the data for long-term preservation.

For deposits to NACDA-OAR, you’re in charge; once you submit, your project becomes immediately available and you can update it, as needed.

How long does it take to make my data available?

  • The timeframe varies based on our priorities and resources. The National Institute on Aging (NIA) funds our project; therefore NIA funded research is prioritized. Read our acquisitions policy for more details on our data priorities.
  • It also depends on:
    • The # of deposits in our queue pending curation
    • The condition of the materials you submit – consistency of data and documentations
    • Immediate concerns that affect the conversion process – such as variable name issues or date variable formats that differ across the stats packages
    • The size of the deposit – # of variables, datasets, and documents

Thanks for sharing your data with the research community!