Using GitHub for Open Data Publishing

A Forray into Publishing Open Data on GitHub

Eric Phetteplace | June 9, 2015

While we’ve written about using GitHub for publishing before, in this post I will explore publishing data on GitHub, as opposed to a presentation or academic paper. There are a few services where one can publish research data—FigShare comes to mind—but I wanted to try GitHub because I’m already familiar with the service, it seems suitable for publishing data alongside the scripts used to obtain and process it, and its focus on version control makes it particularly apt for publishing a work in progress. However, even with free services like GitHub available, open data still has hurdles to overcome. How can I, a lowly librarian with no grant funding or experience in this area, publish an open data set such that others can locate and reuse it? Let’s find out.

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