We're here to help. Librarians will work with and guide you through using DataShare. Contact us at datashare@iastate.edu or visit us in The Catalyst located on the ground floor of Parks Library.

Review process

All datasets go through two reviews before publication.

Start by submitting a data set disclosure.

1. Disclosure review

The following offices check your data for legal and ethical concerns and commercialization potential after your data set disclosure is submitted:

• Office of Innovation Commercialization
• Office of Research Ethics (when applicable)
• Ames Laboratory (when applicable)

Disclosure reviews take a few business days to complete. Be sure to provide information about deadlines in your disclosure and to respond to emails if there are questions. Once complete your data set will enter the curation review.

2. Curation review

Librarians check your data files for organization, formats, documentation, and completeness.

During the review you will be contacted with suggestions for changes and improvements. This process typically starts after the disclosure review is completed. The length of an initial curation reviews varies but will take at least a day or two.

3. Revisions

We will send you a report with any problems that are discovered during the curation review. Most are easy to fix and we often provide suggestions. After you make changes, we'll review the files again and send another report if needed. Depending on schedules - yours and ours - the entire process may take several weeks. Large and/or complex data sets also take longer to review.

4. Dataset publication

Datasets are published and publicly available after the disclosure and curation reviews and revisions are complete.

The timing of when to publish is up to you and we provide flexible options to support peer-review. Please let us know if you require a DOI or private link for peer review before publication.

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