UCL Research Data Repository: Celebrating over 1million views!
By Naomi, on 10 June 2025
Guest post by Dr Christiana McMahon, Research Data Support Officer
Since launching in June 2019, the UCL Research Data Repository has now received over 1million views from over 190 countries and territories across the world! Plus, we have published over 1000 items and facilitated over 800,000 downloads!
This is a huge milestone and demonstrates how far reaching the Research Data Repository has become.
- most viewed record is:
Heenan, Thomas; Jnawali, Anmol; Kok, Matt; Tranter, Thomas; Tan, Chun; Dimitrijevic, Alexander; et al. (2020). Lithium-ion Battery INR18650 MJ1 Data: 400 Electrochemical Cycles (EIL-015). University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/12159462.v1
- most downloaded record is:
Steinmetz, Nicholas A; Zatka-Haas, Peter; Carandini, Matteo; Harris, Kenneth (2019). Distributed coding of choice, action, and engagement across the mouse brain. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9970907.v1
- most cited record is:
Pérez-García, Fernando; Rodionov, Roman; Alim-Marvasti, Ali; Sparks, Rachel; Duncan, John; Ourselin, Sebastien (2020). EPISURG: a dataset of postoperative magnetic resonance images (MRI) for quantitative analysis of resection neurosurgery for refractory epilepsy. University College London. Dataset. https://doi.org/10.5522/04/9996158.v1
What is the UCL Research Data Repository?
From the Research Publications Service for published manuscripts and theses, to MediaCentral for all things media, UCL staff and students can access different places to store their research outputs – and the UCL Research Data Repository is a perfect place for research data, posters, presentations, software, workflows, data management plans, figures and models.
Key features:
- Available to all current staff and research students
- Supports almost all file types
- All published items can have a full data citation including a DOI (unique persistent identifier)
- Items can be embargoed where necessary
- Helps provide access and data sharing
- Preserves and curates outputs for 10+ years
- Facilitates discovery of research outputs
- Helps researchers to meet UCL / funders’ requirements for FAIR data
More information about the service can be found on our website.
Why use the Research Data Repository?
With communities across UCL being actively encouraged to engage with the FAIR principles, it was important to give staff and research students even greater means to do so. The FAIR principles: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable, refer to a set of attributes research outputs should have to enable secondary researchers to find, understand, repurpose and reuse these without major technical barriers. Subsequently, there are many advantages to having FAIR research outputs including:
- Greater accessibility of research outputs
- Enhanced transparency of the research process
- Greater potential to replicate studies and verify findings
- Enhanced potential for greater citation and collaboration
- Encourages members of the public to become involved in research projects and become citizen scientists
- Maximises research potential of existing research resources by reusing and repurposing them
Hence, we developed and launched the Research Data Repository to support staff and research students wanting to further engage with the FAIR principles here at UCL.
Collaboration is key
The Research Data Management team in Library Services and the Research Data Stewardship team from the Centre for Advanced Research Computing, collaborate to provide both administrative and technical support – helping users to upload, publish and archive their research outputs.
You can reach us using researchdatarepository@ucl.ac.uk or join us at one of our online or in-person drop-in sessions.
What does the future hold?
Over the past year, the Research Data Repository team participated in a series of workshops as part of the FAIR-IMPACT Coordination and Support Action funded by the European Union. This work was led by Dr Socrates Varakliotis and supported by Dr Christiana McMahon, Kirsty Wallis, Dr James Wilson and Daniel Delargy.
The aims of these workshops were to:
- firstly, enhance the trustworthiness of the repository; and
- secondly, to enhance the semantic metadata (documentation) made publicly available online
During the first project, we conducted a thorough self-assessment of the information we provide about the repository service with a view to highlighting how we demonstrate trustworthiness. Consequently, we made a series of improvements to our documentation including the publishing of a new, more accessible website.
Over the course of the second project, we focused on improving the standardised metadata we make available to search engines indexing repository information globally. In this project, we were able to demonstrate how having validated metadata is important to supporting the trustworthiness of repository services.
The next step is to further explore how the repository’s trustworthiness may be enhanced even further to formally meet international standards and expectations.
Final thoughts
Having over 1million views truly is a fantastic achievement and testament to the hard work and dedication of those working behind the scenes to provide this brilliant service, and the wonderful users across UCL who have published with us.
Next stop, 2million views – and until then…
The UCL Office for Open Science and Scholarship invites you to contribute to the open science and scholarship movement. Stay connected for updates, events, and opportunities. Follow us on Bluesky, and join our mailing list to be part of the conversation!