Sharing data publicly with openBIS

If you publish a paper and therefore also need to publish the corresponding research data publicly according to funding agencies (e.g. on Zenodo) and if you used openBIS for your research management, you have the option to put your openBIS data connected to the results in the paper on a public openBIS instance.

What are the benefits of sharing in a public openBIS?

Usually you would just upload your research data to a public FAIR repository like Zenodo after finishing your research project, but this means that you loose the data model structures and hierarchy connections that you built in openBIS. If you now export all the paper related research data from your lab openBIS and import it to our public data-repo openBIS, you will be able to share a link to your data and its structure in this public openBIS and therefore allow people to browse through the structure and understand it better.

You can have a look at an example (at the moment still a test and blank) in this data-repo openBIS by accessing this link.

How to set up your data in the public data-repo openBIS?

1. Contact us via email to get access rights to this data-repoopenBIS by providing the following information:

   • Name(s) of the Empa person(s) connected to the paper who need to upload data to this data-repoopenBIS
   • Name of your paper which will then become the Space name in openBIS
   • Send us a link to the data in your lab openBIS (just copy the webbrowser link when you open it in openBIS) that you would like to publish so we can set up a suited data model structure in the data-repoopenBIS

2. We set up your access to the data-repoopenBIS.

   • What is done on our side:
     • At the moment we need to set up an edu-id login for the Empa person to access the data-repoopenBIS. For this we add the Empa person directly in the Admin interface using the Empa email as username and replacing @ with AT (this email must be entered as main email in edu-id). When created, give this Empa user the Admin role to the needed spaces of the paper and also the OBSERVER role for the ELN_SETTINGS Space which is needed if one is not instance admin.
     • We need to create the user related to the paper which is used in the openBIS link sharing, create a user based on file authentication, view documentation how. This means that default roles will be assigned to this user and we need to remove them from the admin UI, only leaving the OBSERVER role for the ELN_SETTINGS Space as this user should not change anything. In addition we need to add the OBSERVER role for the desired Spaces.

3. Now you can access the ELN UI and Admin UI of this data-repoopenBIS

4. We will help you to export all paper related research data from your lab openBIS and import it into the created Space(s) in the public data-repo openBIS
5. We will send you a link which you can use for sharing your data in the data-repo openBIS. IMPORTANT: You still need to publish your research results from the paper first in a FAIR data repository like Zenodo and only post a link there to the data in the data-repo openBIS. You cannot use the data-repo openBIS as FAIR data repository because it is not FAIR as it is not findable on the internet and you need a link to access it.
   • For our internal information:
     • The link will look like https://openbis-empa-data-repo.ethz.ch/openbis/webapp/eln-lims/?user=test_user&pass=password where test_user is the user named after the paper and password is the password used when creating this user via file authentication in the ELN.

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Last update: January 15, 2025