Depositing and storing your data is one of the standard data management requirements of research funders. UCT offers support to ensure compliance with these funder mandates.
UCT offers an institutional data repository service, ZivaHub, which is available to all students and staff at UCT. More information on depositing and publishing data at UCT.
Social science survey and administrative microdata (data at unit record level) from South Africa and other African countries can be deposited with DataFirst.
Alternatively, you can deposit your data with the UCT community on Zenodo. Please be aware that data deposited with Zenodo is stored on CERN servers outside of South Africa.
For information on storage options for raw or working data (data to be collected and analysed during your research project), please note that UCT has contracted with Google and Microsoft to provide researchers with free storage through your UCT Google Drive (10 TB) and UCT One Drive (1 TB) accounts. For data that is too sensitive to be stored on cloud services, or is legally required to remain within South Africa, you can use the networked UCT G-drive. For more information, consult the UCT Research Support Hub's information on "storing research data".
Good documentation and metadata help to make your data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). Any metadata or additional documentation pertaining to your research and research data should be deposited with the data files. Supplying supporting documentation such as study descriptions, project plans, lab notebooks and codebooks are all ways of making the data more understandable to future users.
For assistance with the creation of basic, generic metadata for your research outputs, follow the UCT Metadata Entry Guidelines provided by the Metadata Working Group (MWG).
Figuring out what type of metadata is best suited to describing your research data is a complex task. The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) provides links to a range of discipline-specific metadata standards, which are important to consider when creating documentation for your research data.
ZivaHub, UCT's institutional repository for sharing processed datasets that support research outputs, is free of charge to UCT affiliates, with a limit of 20GB per user. You can request more space via the interface, but note that this may carry an additional charge.
The storage provided though the G Drive, UCT Google Drive and UCT One Drive is free. The current pricing for additional onsite storage of working project data is updated periodically on the eResearch website. It is important to include these storage costs in your funding application.
Given the variable demand for data storage and the exponential growth in that demand, ICTS is obliged to pass on the direct cost of data storage to users. The cost is not static, as it must remain related to market prices, with the assurance that every effort is made to negotiate favourable pricing in greater economies of scale.