Researcher Spotlights

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

The Illinois Data Bank saves time, and the deposit process is easy with great support from the curators! After completing the deposit process, I almost instantly received a link to include it in my manuscript.

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 of archiving my data is to make the information available to others that might be interested, and to foster an environment of openness and transparency in research. My decision to deposit is driven mainly by my interest in facilitating future discovery in others, and trying to maximize benefits from the data that we've generated.

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.

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.

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!

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!

Depositing my data demonstrates my commitment to performing reproducible research. MRI datasets and analysis pipelines can be complicated; sharing the data and the processing scripts gives me peace of mind that the details of my work are preserved and can be built upon and improved after I have moved on to other things.

I have now deposited four data sets at the Illinois Data Bank. Each time the staff has thoroughly checked my data files and documentation for omissions or mistakes. They have always been knowledgeable, responsive, and helpful. Their participation gives me confidence that the dataset will be accurate and useful.

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.

Depositing data in the Illinois Data Bank makes me feel like I didn't just do this research project for myself. These data are now in a public repository where they will be preserved and available for future use. Anybody can now learn from the data we have collected. It makes me feel good about the work I have done.

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!

Apart from usefully archiving the data for my own use, it makes our data available to others, and enables them to reproduce and extend our work. The process of archiving our own data also helps us to be diligent about creating adequate documentation surrounding it.

The Data Bank is easy to use. The staff are informed and very helpful. The university is fortunate to have such a resource available to its staff and faculty; unencumbered by bureaucratic process or fees.

Archiving data in a repository saves me the trouble of managing data myself over the long term. This gives me peace of mind: I don’t have to worry about losing data and always know where to find it.

On the one hand, I like being able to deposit my data and immediately get a permanent link that I can include in a manuscript; on the other, I also like the support provided by the Data Bank's data curators, including pre-publication checks of the metadata, which help improve access and interpretation by downstream users.

“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.”

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.

It is truly fantastic to have a convenient and cost-free platform for storing my data. With in situ electron microscopy, each experiment generates numerous images and corresponding analysis, which makes efficient data organization, storage, and transfer highly necessary. Illinois Dank Bank not only fulfills these needs, but also provides us with a professional and transparent way of data sharing with more researchers who are interested in our work or seeking to leverage our data for further innovation. Creating a knowledge-sharing environment is crucial to foster collaboration, inspire innovation, and verify data reliability. Furthermore, the staff here is also super responsive and professional, helping me improve my data description and make them more accessible to a wider audience.

It is wonderful to have the Illinois Data Bank as a resource to archive my group's research data in support of our scientific publications. We are committed to sharing our research data and the Illinois Data Bank makes this easy!

It is also great to work with the Illinois Data Bank because they understand and work with the peer review process. They will provide a draft mode for use during peer review, but will wait to publish the data until the paper has been accepted. It is also helpful to have a DOI for the data so that other researchers can easily find and build upon it.

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 have always believed in the concept of open research, and I strive to make all the datasets and modeling tools generated from my research to be publicly available. To achieve better confidence in adopting improved soil management as a natural climate solution, we need to improve the quantification of various soil ecosystem service outcomes under different climate and management scenarios using modeling tools. However, models can never be accurate enough without using on-the-ground datasets for calibration and validation. Open datasets can help alleviate the data gaps that the soil modeling community is faced with.

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.

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.

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 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.