Ten simple rules for improving research data discovery

Sharing and reusing research data present both opportunities and challenges for the individual researcher, their organizations, and the entire research community, but the promise of data sharing can only be actualized if the right data can be found.While grants and publications increasingly include data sharing requirements, locating the right data to answer a research question can still be challenging.As more data is shared more frequently, the data discovery problem becomes more apparent.There is simply more data to look through, and that data is distributed across a growing number of repositories, article supplements, websites, and other locations with different metadata, data standards, and search functionality.These 10 rules can be thought of as a mirror to "Eleven Quick Tips for Finding Research Data," providing key guidance on how to make your research data more findable in the complicated systems that share and provide access to research [1].As opposed to helping locate data for reuse, this article is meant to help you make your data and your research more discoverable.The rules below walk you through the process of making your data more discoverable, including key steps to take when publishing an article (Rules 8 and 9).As members of the Data Discovery Collaboration (DDC) [2], our work focuses on the issue of data discovery.We are a community of librarians and information professionals and are invested in helping to improve data findability and open data infrastructure more broadly.In service of these goals, we created these rules to provide guidance on how to improve the discovery of your research data by making key decisions early in the process (Rules 1 and 2), leveraging scholarly infrastructure already in place (Rules 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7), taking important steps at the point of publication (Rules 8 and 9), and tapping into the growing community of data professionals (Rule 10). Rule 1: Decide what level of access you can provideData discovery is not data access.You can make your data discoverable without making it openly available.Data discovery is the process of learning that a dataset exists, whereas data access is the ability to download or view that data.Both of these concepts are part of the FAIR