Open science democratises knowledge, fosters transparency and reproducibility, and accelerates innovation by making research findings accessible to everyone. Sharing your data and making it openly accessible facilitates collaboration, allows others to validate and build upon your research, and contributes to solving global challenges through shared scientific efforts.

Open science is greatly enhanced by using open-source software like Python (using an environment manager such as conda) and Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Notebooks are a powerful asset, seamlessly integrating code, data, and documentation into a single interactive document. This promotes reproducible research and simplifies the process of sharing work with students for training or colleagues for verification. By using these tools and making your work openly accessible, you contribute to a transparent and collaborative scientific community.

Additionally, you can use 100 GB of free storage on a Hessian-hosted server called HESSENBOX.

TUDatalib serves as a platform for storing and sharing research data; sharing the research data presented in your publication is a strong factor in open science. This guide aims to help you create a data repository for your research data related to a paper on TUDatalib.

Before starting the creation of your data repository, make sure that your data is well-organised and is clearly and systematically named. Details of the naming convention should go in the “Description” (DESCRIBE II) section.

Go to https://tudatalib.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/login and logon with your TU-ID (personal login id).

If this is not your first logon, skip to Start a new submission. If this is your first login, follow the steps below; you will be prompted through registration steps. After login, you can “subscribe” to the SMI repository. This is not essential, but makes later steps easier. To do this, click on your name at the top right hand corner of the website.

Then, under the subscriptions heading, select the SMI collection (T050205). Make sure to click “Add” after selecting, followed by “Update profile”.

NOTE: Before starting your submission, please contact Suvendu or Markus or Christian to finalise your account. Please only contact us after completing the above steps.

Below is a brief tutorial on how to create a submission on TUdatalib. Suggestions are made as a guide. You can save your submission as a draft at any time to continue later by selecting the “Save and exit” button at the bottom of the form.

1) Navigate to https://tudatalib.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/submit and select Weiche Materie an Grenzflächen (T050205) from the dropdown menu. Then select next.

2) INFORMATION: Read the information in in the Note section, and make sure that publishing your data on the repository is permitted. When ready, select next.

3) DESCRIBE I: This is where you will provide all the citation data relating to the repository and corresponding publication.

• Your title should include the title of your manuscript with the prefix “Supplementary data for…” or “Supporting information for…”; whichever is the preferred language by the publisher.
• Authors can be manually added, or you can use the “Lookup” function if they are already in the database.
• The date can be selected as the date the repository is created.
• The “Relation” should eventually be linked to the publication. During the initial creation of the data repository you may not have the DOI of the article. This can be updated later.

4) DESCRIBE II: This is where you will provide the metadata for your data. Be sure to provide information on the purpose of the data, a description on the file/folder structure, a detailed description of what your data is (i.e., AFM images, reflectivity curves, etc.) and a description of the analysis pipeline (any analysis scripts or notebooks, links to other open-source software). This should also be reflected in the “Type” of data chosen.

5) ACCESS: Here you will define the access to the repository.

• OPEN: You can immediately make it open to the general public by selecting “Anonymous” from the Group dropdown menu and then selecting “Confirm Policy & add another”. A DOI for the repository will be generated at the end of the submission process.
• CLOSED: Alternatively, you may want to limit access during the peer review process, allowing only the reviewers to view the repository. To do this, select T050205 and then request a provide token from the admins at tudata@tu-darmstadt.de.

6) UPLOAD: Here you will upload your data. For large volumes of data it is recommended to archive/zip them. For example, you may want to archive all Zetasizer files in one zip and all DLS files in another zip, then provide the appropriate analysis notebooks or code. Note: the README.txt file should contain the “Description” text that was provided in step 4.

7) LICENSE: Here you will select your license. This is very important. If you are unsure which license to select, consult your supervisor, generally, however, a CC BY License or ODC BY License is frequently used for data repositories and a 3-Clause BSD License is used for code repositories.

8) REVIEW & SUBMIT: The final stage of the submission process is to review your submission. Most metadata can be changed post-submission, however, the re-uploading of data files will trigger the issuance of a new DOI. Ideally this is to be avoided. When you are ready, grant the agreement and select “Complete Submission”.

You can now view your submission!

This section will grow as questions are asked.

Further information on TUdatalib can be found on their FAQ page.