Many scientific journals now ask for data used and processing computer code or software developed in the study to be openly shared – which is as it should be. Most university research is publicly funded and therefore should be publicly available.
I always had troubles finding a good place to supply this data if the journal does not have its own means of storing supplementary material along with the journal. However, today it came about that I really had to sit down and find a data repository option that would work for large files and i have settled upon Zenodo. The EC commissioned the OpenAIRE project, to lead open access and open data movements in Europe in support of their nascent Open Data policy by providing a catch-all repository for EC funded research. CERN, an OpenAIRE partner and pioneer in open source, open access and open data, provided this capability and Zenodo was launched in May 2013.
Zenodo seems to really make it easy to upload all sorts and any size of data or other contribution, assign a digital object identifier (used as a permanent reference for this contribution)
For example here Simon Gascoin uploaded Satellite images of the 17 July 2016 Aru Co glacier collapse in Tibet. Below is a GIF animation switching between two of the images uplaoded:
- Sentinel-2A image of the Aru Co glacier avalanche acquired on 21-Jul-2016 (4 days after the event). RGB composite of bands B4,B3,B2 scaled to bytes between 0 and 0.5 from level 1C product (orthorectified top-of-atmosphere reflectances).
- Landsat-8 image of the Aru Co area acquired on 24-Jun-2016 (23 days before the event). RGB composite of bands B4,B3,B2 scaled to bytes between 0 and 0.5 from level 1C product (orthorectified top-of-atmosphere reflectances).
The Aru Co glacier collapse was a surprise as it was a huge mass glacier movement of a kind not previously documented. A good description of the event, and a second glacier collapse from the same range a few weeks later can be found here.
I feel like I should have been using this for a long time, and I guess I will start uploading some datasets there in the coming days and weeks.
My first dataset is up there now: Ngozumpa Glacier Gokyo ice cliffs photographic surface model, which is based on photographs taken in April 2016.
