Making data publicly available via figshare | Dana C. Ernst

"I’m currently working on the finishing touches of an article that I am writing with Angie Hodge and Andy Schultz ... As part of our project, we gave rather extensive pre- and post-test surveys that we wrote ourselves. The surveys were aimed at gaining understanding of students’ perception of the effectiveness of the teaching methods that Andy and I used in our number theory courses, particularly (i) the inquiry-based learning (IBL) approach we employed and (ii) course assignments that involved formal peer review of student work. We had hoped that we would find a use for all the data, but in the end, we’re currently only working with the questions directly related to peer review.  While we were writing the article, Andy commented that it seems weird that in this day and age, researchers don’t automatically make all of their raw data public. (Of course, this may not always be legally allowed or ethically viable.) Just a few weeks before Andy raised this issue, I had learned about figshare, which among other things aims to address Andy’s concern ... One of the perks of figshare is that all research made publicly available on figshare gets allocated a DataCite DOI at point of publication. The upshot is that any entry on figshare can be cited using traditional citation methods, no matter what form the research output come in. You can also export the citation to Endnote, RefMan, and Mendeley by clicking the links under Export in the side panel of every page.  As of July 1, 2013, the raw data from our surveys is now available on figshare. You can find it here. Since we are using a shared bibliography in Mendeley, we exported the citation information to Mendeley and shazam! I’ve also included the data below via an embed code, mostly because I wanted to see how it works, not because I expect anyone to actually read it ..."