Study

Depositors must gather the data and all related documentation. By documentation we mean all files that are direct or indirectly related to the study and enable its full comprehension, such as: questionnaire, cards, instructions to the interviewer, method report, all publications produced in the framework of the project and others that may be relevant.

Data anonymisation

All data must be anonymous before submission. Please verify if all respondents are anonymous. During the anonymization of the dataset, please consider the following procedures:
•Removal of any variable that may lead to the direct identification of a respondent (ex.: names, addresses, postcode, telephone number, email).
•Recode of variables that may lead to the indirect identification of a respondent (ex.: school, occupation, income, age).
•Recode of open questions that may present a risk of identification of a respondent. In this case, the depositor has to describe the way the recode was made (ex.: grouping the most mentioned answers).

File formats

Ensure that data is sent in a preferred format of the archive. APIS preferred formats are Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS), Stata or Excel for datasets and Word or PDF for documentation. By preferred formats we mean formats whose process of curation, dissemination and preservation are guaranteed by the archive. Every other format is accepted and migrated to preferred formats whenever possible. Otherwise, data is returned to the depositor.

 

FAIR

Making data FAIR is a joint responsibility of researchers and data repositories.

The attention of researchers is increasingly directed to the phases of the research lifecycle in which data are published, shared, discovered and reused. One of the perceived ways to achieve optimal reuse is to make data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) (Force 11, 2014; Wilinson, et al., 2016).

If you want to know how FAIR is your data, have a look at the checklist by Jones and Grootveld (2017).