At the end of a project, software and/or data should be archived for the long-term, at a minimum of 10 years, if possible openly available according to FAIR data principles. The archive where software or data is stored should preferentially be a trustworthy digital repository, which has the exclusive mission of long-term archiving and will provide your archived materials with a persistent identifier (preferably a DOI).
Our preferred repository is Zenodo.org (at CERN). Zenodo is publicly funded, provides a DOI, has great integration with GitHub, and takes up to 50GB of data for free. We collect records from the Zenodo community CWI automatically. Zenodo is not officially certified but meets all the requirements of a trustworthy digital repository. Two main certified repositories in the Netherlands are 4TU.Centre for Research Data and EASY-DANS. ArXiv.org allows storage of small amounts and is also trustworthy.
For large datasets (>50GB) please contact us. Note that the cost of archiving large volumes should be included in the budget.
A trustworthy digital repository may be recognised by a seal of quality such as the CoreTrustSeal, Nestor Seal, or Iso standard 16363.
Please note:
- Platforms such as GitHub or Bitbucket are not suitable for long-term archiving. They give no guarantees for longevity or assign persistent identifiers common in academia. However GitHub works well with Zenodo.
- Journals also do not guarantee long-term storage, so please do not rely on the supplementary materials with a publication. Usually journals will accept a link to the archived materials instead of the materials themselves.
- We strongly discourage archiving software or data in commercial repositories.
You can find more (non-profit) repositories at re3data.org
