Reasons to Manage and Publish Your Data:

• Increase the visibility of your research: Making your data available to other researchers through widely-searched repositories (such as Georgia Tech's SMARTech) can increase your prominence and demonstrate continued use of the data and relevance of your research.

• Meet grant requirements: Many funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation, now require that researchers include data management or data sharing plans in their proposals. They may also require deposit of research data in a data archive.

• Save time: Planning for your data management needs ahead of time will save you time and resources in the long run. 

• Increase your research efficiency: Have you ever had a hard time understanding the data you or your colleagues have collected? Documenting your data throughout its life cycle saves time by ensuring that in the future you and others will be able to understand and use your data. 

• Maintain data integrity & reliability: Responsible data management protects data from falsification and preserves confidential information. It can also clarify the ownership of property rights.

• Preserve your data: Depositing your data in a trusted repository can ensure that they will be available to you and other researchers in the long-term. Doing so safeguards your investment of time and resources and preserves your unique contribution to research. 

• Facilitate new discoveries: Enabling other researchers to use your data reinforces open scientific inquiry and can lead to new and unanticipated discoveries. And doing so prevents duplication of effort by enabling others to use your data rather than try to recreate the data themselves.

• Support Open Access: Researchers are becoming increasingly more aware of the need to manage their work and consider issues of scholarly communication. The Open Data Commons advocates for researchers to share their data in order to foster the development of knowledge.

Thanks to MIT Libraries for sharing their content.