Illinois Data Bank

You are ready to deposit data if:

  • your data is in a final state and not expected to undergo revisions.
  • you have removed any private, confidential, or other legally protected information from your data.
  • you are a faculty member, staff member, or graduate student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
  • you have permission to publicly distribute data from all creator(s) and/or copyright owner(s).

Published data:

  • is open to anyone in the world.
  • receives a stable identifier (DOI) for easy reference and citation.
  • is readily available for anyone to access for a minimum of 5 years.
  • is located in a stable environment that complies with many funder and publisher requirements.

Researcher Spotlight

featured researcher photo
Yijing Huang Yijing earned her B.S. in Physics from Tsinghua University in 2016 and completed her Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University in 2022. Her research focuses on light–matter interaction, with particular emphasis on ultrafast X-ray scattering, terahertz spectroscopy, and nonequilibrium states of matter. Her doctoral work was recognized with the 2022 LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source) Young Investigator Award, and her thesis, Towards the Optical Control of Resonantly Bonded Materials, received the Springer Thesis Award and was published in the Springer Theses series in 2023. She was also selected as a finalist for the Carl E. Anderson Division of Laser Science Dissertation Award. Dr. Huang was an IQUIST (Illinois Quantum Information Science and Technology) Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
What do you see as the primary benefit to you of archiving your data in a repository? What influenced your decision to deposit your data in the Illinois Data Bank? Is there anything else you would like to share about the Research Data Service, Illinois Data Bank, or your research?
For me, archiving data preserves the most fundamental principles of experimental science: reproducibility and openness to re-examination. Scientific interpretations evolve over time, but the data itself should remain accessible and stand on its own. A well-maintained data repository provides a durable foundation for experimental research by enabling others to verify, revisit, and build upon prior work. In an era of rapidly expanding scientific output, trusted data repositories play an essential role in maintaining the long-term health and integrity of the research community.

During the manuscript preparation process, I became increasingly aware of how central reproducibility is to meaningful scientific progress. A peer-reviewed journal article, by necessity, can only include a limited subset of experimental details, and many aspects of the workflow—especially those not directly queried during peer review—are often omitted. Depositing data in the Illinois Data Bank allowed me to provide a more complete and transparent record of the research process, including experimental details that are important for replication but difficult to fully document within a traditional publication. This level of openness supports more robust verification and reuse of results beyond what is typically possible in a journal article alone.

The Illinois Data Bank is an excellent resource for researchers at the University of Illinois, and the Research Data Service staff were exceptionally helpful throughout the data publication process. Their guidance made it much easier to address practical and conceptual questions related to data sharing, documentation, and long-term accessibility. I am genuinely grateful for the support provided by the platform and see it as an important component of responsible and transparent scientific research.

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