Can I share my data - Checklist

Use this check list to guide your decision on whether you are ready to share your data and where to share it. Return to the decision questions for more detail on each question.

1. Is sharing restricted under Intellectual Properties rights?

  • 1.1. Has your funder or industry partner approved data sharing?
  • 1.2. Have you investigated commercial potential of your data?

2. Are you sharing data acquired from living humans?

  • 2.1. Human alive at the time of data collection.
  • 2.2. Ex vivo human.
  • 2.3. Non-human animal.

3. Have you considered data governance with respect to sharing?

  • 3.1. Have you discussed open data sharing in your data management plan?
  • 3.2. Have you completed a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) screening form which references data sharing?

4. Do you have ethical approvals in place?

  • 4.1. Have you described data sharing in your ethics application?
  • 4.2. Has your participant consented to data sharing?

5. Have you de-identified your data?

  • 5.1. Have you removed any “direct identifiers” in your data?
  • 5.2. Are your imaging data in participant space?
  • 5.3. Have your Participant IDs been protected?
  • 5.4. Have “indirect identifiers” such as age, gender, handedness or disease status been protected?
  • 5.5. Have unique dicom fields been scrubbed?
  • 5.6. Have unique fields in .json sidecar files been scrubbed?
  • 5.7. Have images been defaced?
  • 5.8. Have you conducted and prepared to share a quality control analysis?

6. Have you prepared the data according to community standards?

  • 6.1. For example BIDS for MRI.

7. Have you prepared the metadata to make your data FAIR?

  • 7.1. Are behavioural and clinical covariates appropriately described?
  • 7.2. Are you able to share the image acquisition protocol?
  • 7.3. Has the experimental protocol been described and made ready to share with the data?

8. Can access to your data be restricted?

  • 8.1. Can you create a “reviewer only” link?
  • 8.2. Can you restrict access to bonafide researchers only?

9. Can you ensure that you are appropriately acknowledged when your data are reused?

  • 9.1. Can you create a doi for your data?
  • 9.2. Can you select a license which requires attribution?

10. Would you like to impose custom terms around the reuse of your data?

  • 10.1. Would you like to impose requirements for authorship?
  • 10.2. Would you like to impose restrictions on resharing?
  • 10.3. Would you like to explicitly prohibit attempts to reidentify participants in your data?
  • 10.4. Would you like to add any funder requirements in the reuse of your data?