You may wish to share your research data with other researchers, or your funders may require you to share your data. Sharing your data will ensure your research is cited more widely. DataFirst is the only open African research data repository that is internationally certified as a Trusted Digital Repository. We will manage and publish your research data according to international best practice.
Our mission is to promote open African research data as a public good. We therefore do not accept data we cannot share in some way. You have the option to share your data for research-use only. If your data are sensitive or contain personal information, we can anonymise the data for you, or share it in our secure Remote Access Data Enclave.
1. How do I deposit my data with DataFirst?
Contact us at datafirst-support@uct.ac.za and we will assist you to deposit your data with us for hosting and sharing on our data site. Read the Memorandum of Agreement, we sign with data depositors.
2. What does DataFirst charge to host my data on their data repository?
DataFirst charges a once-off Data Hosting Fee of R40,000 to R70,000 per dataset, depending on the dataset and your Project’s access to funding for data sharing.
Research funding bodies increasingly mandate post-project data sharing. They may also provide additional funds for you to share your data. These funds should cover our hosting fee. In any case, we recommend that you build data curation costs into your initial research funding proposals.
DataFirst can also create a branded page for your project for an additional R14,000.
Curation costs will be agreed upon in the data sharing Memorandum of Agreement we sign with you as the Depositor.
Small-scale academic projects and projects without funds for data sharing should please contact us so that we can arrange to sponsor the hosting of your data on our repository.
For the Data Hosting Fee, DataFirst will:
- Assist your project to prepare Data Management Plans for funders;
- Quality-check your data;
- Anonymise your data for public access; or
- Prepare and archive your sensitive data for sharing via our secure Remote Access Data Enclave
- Publish metadata (informative descriptions of your data) to help data re-users;
- Make your data available in the long term under a clear data use license;
- Disseminate your data in compliance with national data protection legislation and research ethics;
- Require data re-users to cite you as the data producers in their research publication based on the data;
- Provide your project with regular statistics on how your data is being used.
3. What type of data can I deposit with DataFirst?
Scope
Our collections policy is to only collect African data. However, some datasets may be from multi-country projects and we do then accept both the African and non-African data components. Our subject focus is social science, humanities, and health data. We do not collect aggregated data but focus on making primary data (anonymised raw data) available because this type of data has high value for policy researchers.
Data Type
DataFirst accepts administrative records, survey research data, and any other data that could be useful for research. While no data is error-free, DataFirst reserves the right to choose not to disseminate datasets that do not meet certain quality and usability standards.
4. What formats should the data be in?
DataFirst accepts data files in all formats, including Excel, but preferred formats for data files are Stata and SPSS. Data deposited in other formats will be converted to our standard formats.
5. What should be included with the data files?
Background documentation helps other researchers to understand your data and helps us to create informative metadata. Documents that should be deposited with the data files, include administrative forms, questionnaires, code lists, manuals, analytic notes, reports and any documents useful for understanding how the data was collected and how it may be used.
6. How will DataFirst make the data available?
All data deposited with us will be shared with the data access model chosen by you as the data depositor as appropriate for your data.
Access to data can be:
Public use - data shared under a Creative Commons CC-BY attribution-only license.
Non-commercial use ("Licensed") - data must be requested online and approved but is still available online within 24 hours. This data is shared under a Creative Commons CC-BY-NC license.
On-site restricted-access data ("Data Enclave" access) - Restricted-access data is sensitive data or data that has detailed geographic variables. This data is therefore shared with researchers who are accredited by DataFirst to work on the data via our secure Remote Access Data Enclave.