getting started

Set up your profile

Once logged in, you will see your profile icon at the top right of the screen. You can access and modify your profile page by clicking on your profile icon.

By adding information about yourself to your profile, colleagues who find your published research will have the opportunity to learn more about you and your work, thereby increasing the likelihood of their engagement with your research, sharing it, and creating opportunities for collaboration.

You can:

• Add your first and last name and job title
• Add a photo of yourself
• Add your research field of interest from the drop down list
• Add your geographic location
• Provide links to your social media pages and other relevant websites
• Include biographical information
• Provide links to any publications you may have on the web

You are also encouraged to create an ORCID - a unique, digital identifier to distinguish yourself from other researchers with similar names. Add your ORCID ID to your 4TU.ResearchData profile to automatically sync your published items with your unique ID. Please note that once you publish a dataset, your profile page will then become public.

Any data you have made public via 4TU.ResearchData will also appear on your public profile page along with a list of your research co-workers and collaborators.

Basic navigation

The dashboard page is your personal page you will see once you are logged in. On this page you will find quick links for adding a new dataset and creating a new collection, your storage volume is shown, as well as session information and your created API tokens. On the top you will see a tab for creating an API token, and tabs to go to your datasets and collections.

My datasets

Datasets are the digital objects that you upload to 4TU.ResearchData. Datasets may be any information, data, text, software, scripts, graphics, and interactive features generated, and may consist of one or multiple files.

The My datasets area is your private data management section where you can upload files, keep them private, share them with collaborators and publish data when you are ready. From this page you can create a private link for your dataset by clicking on the private link icon under "Actions". You are also able to edit a dataset, for example by adding files to or removing files from the item, editing the metadata or making the dataset public. To do so, click on the dataset title that will then bring up the metadata form.

Please note: if the dataset is published, updating the file(s) will create a new version of the dataset. Read more in the section Modification and versioning.

My collections

Collections are groupings of published datasets. Datasets from different sources may be grouped in a collection, and the collection itself can be published and be assigned a DOI. Collections may also be private. Please find more details on how to create a Collection on this page in the tab ‘Collections’.

Connecting with Git

Git repositories are widely used version control repositories primarily for code but they don't provide persistent, long-term preservation. 4TU.ResearchData allows you to easily publish the code associated with your research output directly from your Git repo. This will ensure you can share a particular release of your software, create a DOI for your software and that your software will be available in the future.

When publishing your software files in 4TU.ResearchData, make sure that you select Software deposit in the Files section at the bottom of the upload form. This opens up the ability to upload your software files directly through your Git repo. If you don't use the connection to your Git repo or you have (addtional) files, you can still drag your software files from your local drive to the box on the same page.

Do you want a DOI badge on your Git repository?
This is bonus but for visitors of your Git repository it can be nice to find a badge in your README that informs them about and links to the preserved code on 4TU.ResearchData.
Copy the markdown snippet below to your README file and replace the two number sequences with the DOI suffix.

[](https://doi.org/10.4121/22215562)

Or the version-specific one:
[](https://doi.org/10.4121/22215562.v3).

Example badge:

Sandbox

The sandbox allows users to try out the latest functionality of the data repository in a safe environment without the risk of making their dataset publicly available.
Only visitors to the sandbox can view and optionally download published (test) datasets.
Published datasets in the sandbox are not indexed and no live DOIs are registered, making them not globally discoverable.

You can access the sandbox at: https://next.data.4tu.nl after which logging in works the same as in the production environment.
For more information about logging in, see the ‘Log in’ tab in the “Getting Started” section.