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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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!

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 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.