Social problems exist within space and time, and thus there are forces at play in Illinois’ communities that are not considered by aspatial theories and analysis. As an undergraduate at Illinois learning about Geographic Information Systems, I would have appreciated having a resource like this to reduce the barrier of entry for a social scientist to think about measures spatially. It just changes your cognitive framework when you can visualize things like racial stratification, population distribution, political election results… or even how all of these measures interact with one another! GIS enhance sociological research by encouraging a different way of thinking about societal challenges.

By making data available to other researchers through the Illinois Data Bank we increase the potential impact of our work. Other researchers can use these data as part of reviews or syntheses, which allows the work we did to become part of a larger study, and may garner additional interest in our project. Moreover, depositing the data provides a safeguard against loss of the original data, and preserves it for future uses.

We do a huge amount of simulation and testing to understand methods and how methods work on datasets. I’ve never had to store this amount of data. Having data-sharing resources available is an unbelievably helpful and necessary thing for us in terms of transparency and the data being usable in the research community.

Sharing data is a critical part of my research process. Making survey data available helps others verify my results, which increases my credibility. It also allows others to use and cite my data to draw their own interpretations and to complement their own research. This is particularly important for research areas in which there isn’t a lot of data available. Archiving my data also gives me peace of mind that the data will not be lost due to equipment failures or misplacing a thumb drive. I know I can access my data in the future because it’s safe in the Illinois Data Bank.

I’m a firm believer in Open Access and Open Data, so I always make a point of making sure my data, survey instruments, and publications are in a repository. The Illinois Data Bank is a safe, sustainable, and secure place to share my data, and has a great reputation on campus and beyond. The level of collaborative service and professionalism of the Illinois Data Bank staff makes me feel confident that my data will be well cared for and available to cite, share, and reuse in the future.

I’d urge other scholars to explore ways to make their data and other research outputs open. It’s a great way to increase awareness of your work, and is much safer than ad hoc data storage, and more affordable than commercial solutions. I kind of feel like an ad for Illinois Data Bank, but I really do believe they’re among the best in the academic data repository business, and there’s nobody I’d rather trust with my data!

Archiving data makes the processes used in our work very explicit. It also means nobody has to ask me: Can I have the data? Yes! It's already public.

I really appreciate the library's professional review: if Data Bank staff find the formats or organization of my data confusing, my colleagues would, too. On the other hand, my research focuses on the medical literature. Reproducibility is an increasing concern in medicine, and I feel it's my responsibility to make my own research as reproducible as possible.

Open-access datasets are important resources in my field. They allow researchers to test new algorithms on real-world data that would otherwise be difficult and time-consuming to collect. A common data set can also provide a fair basis for comparison between different algorithms. Unfortunately, these datasets are often difficult to access and may disappear entirely if their creators fail to maintain them. By publishing my dataset in the Illinois Data Bank, I can ensure that it remains accessible to the research community for many years.

The Illinois Data Bank helped me organize and annotate my data sets so that researchers in and out of my field could use and understand my data. Many publications are now requiring researchers to upload their data to repositories and make their data easily accessible instead of writing, "Our data can be obtained by contacting the authors." However, just because the data is easily downloaded, does not mean that the data is useful. I uploaded my data to the Illinois Data Bank not just to fill a requirement but to make sure that my data was publicly available, annotated, and useful.

“I poured myself, heart and soul into generating the dataset for this paper. It seems wrong for its usefulness to stop now that I graduated and a paper has been published. Depositing the dataset into the Illinois Data Bank gives me the feeling that my work in graduate school had purpose, that other scientists can pick up the torch where I left off.”

As we strive to increase the transparency and reproducibility of our findings, data sharing is becoming the norm in the scientific community. By using the Illinois Data Bank to curate and safely archive my datasets, I am able to make my datasets publicly and readily available, and researchers can use it for multiple applications within the discipline.

The learning experience that one gets during the curation process enables researchers to build more comprehensive metadata structures and improved data management plans that may influence how we collect and share data in the future.

I have used other data repositories in the past. The Illinois Data Bank was a whole different experience. The data specialist at the repository helped me best shape my data to be usable by other scientist, none of the other services I used was so through and meticulous with the whole submission process. I am glad we have this service available.

The primary benefit of archiving my data in the repository is that it allows me to share it with other interested researchers and increase visibility. There are a lot of perspectives on usage statistics in campus repositories. Sharing the work allows for the conversations to continue and provides opportunities for new ideas, improvement, and innovation.

While I found many options available to store my data online, the cost was prohibitive for my tight graduate student budget and my project did not have funds to cover the cost of data storage. As I looked for more economical options I was surprised and happy to find that the U of I had an option that was free to students and faculty.

This data was collected from heterogeneous sources to examine the vigorous proliferation of open, online databases published a popular journal over the past 25 years. Sustaining such resources is a challenge that will only grow in magnitude as data sharing becomes increasingly more common across many disciplines. I want to enable research in this area and believe this data can be used to address additional questions. Being familiar with those supporting the Illinois Data Bank (full disclosure, I’m the team leader), I have complete confidence and respect for the curators and developers that stand behind this service. I also find myself returning to the data archived here as an authoritative copy simply out of convenience.

I believe in open science, and that includes making my data available. The review process – having an expert go through my data before publishing a dataset has been incredibly helpful.

The Data Bank is free, and it allows any type of data, which is great. [...] We liked that we could put essentially any information in there that we wanted, including the original handwritten field notes. Having that in the same repository as the genetic data, the phenotypes, the R scripts for data analysis - the paper explains everything from field observations to how to sequence the DNA. We have a broad range of data types all in one repository, which is great. I also really like the ability to link to other datasets; the raw DNA sequence data is many gigabytes and that's stored in NCBI, but we can put a link from this dataset back to NCBI as well.

This dataset was developed as a collaborative effort from multiple people, so we were interested in storing our data in one secure place as a long-term backup and we needed to fulfill data storage requirements for publication. Illinois Data Bank was great to work with and very thoroughly checked our data to make sure we did not have any errors before submission which was appreciated.

Many Scientific journals now require that your data be archived and available upon request if you are to publish your work with them. Because the university system is so easy to use, it was an easy choice to use Illinois Data Bank. The data is now safely stored and readily available for researchers to use at any time.

The primary benefit to me is to keep my data protected in a safe place so that I can access it in the future should I wish to build on that research.

I deposited my data in the Illinois Data Bank so that I can link the data to my research article and make it easily accessible to other researchers in the field. Sharing data in the Illinois Data Bank is easy and helpful both to the researcher and to other colleagues in the field. I highly recommend others to share their data, too!

The data from my PhD thesis represents 4 years of research work, the whole package of which bundles not only large datasets but also the numerical model and codes for data analysis and visualization. I'm happy to find such a reliable place to house my research data so that my efforts to create, document, and organize those data won't be lost, and that others can build off of all the work I’ve already done. I really hope that the Data Bank keeps growing so that more researchers become aware of the service, and that more datasets produced by Illinois researchers are to be explored, re-used and to inspire new discovery.

The primary benefit is to share the data publicly that I used to produce my research. As a person also studies methods in science, I understand it is possible to reach different conclusions using different methods. Yet the underlying data are always the same. Sharing the data is a way of showing honesty about my research and leaving the door open for future examination.

Research Data Service staff brought to our attention several errors and inconsistencies in our data, although we have done checking several times and thought our dataset was water-tight. Having another pair of eyes always help!