Publishing data

As a researcher you probably want to publish your research data at some point in time. Coscine provides you with a data management platform, but only you and your project members can access the data.
To facilitate data sharing and promote the FAIR principles, the Coscine Python SDK enables you to provide your data to external users without requiring them to register and join your project.

The technical details

For each file that is stored inside of a Coscine resource, a download url is generated. This download url is valid for a limited timeframe and expires after this timeframe has been exceeded. Using the Coscine Python SDK one can fetch the download url and expiry timestamp for each file of interest and make them available on a 3rd party platform.

import json
import coscine
client = coscine.ApiClient(TOKEN)
index = client.project("My Project").resource("My Resource").file_index()
with open("index.json", "w", encoding="utf-8") as fp:
    json.dump(index, fp)

As 3rd party platforms numerous contenders come in mind:

• GitHub

• GitLab

• Google Drive

• Sciebo

• …

Simply drop your file index on one of these websites and share the link with peers or fetch the file via software if you use your data in a software package. Note that the file must be refreshed every X hours (usually 24 hours) in order to keep the download urls from expiring.
GitHub and GitLab present themselves as prime candidates to automate refreshing the files via the integration of GitHub Actions and GitLab Actions.

Even fancier: A website for your research data

Talking about GitHub and GitLab and their ability to automate workflows and host files brings up another topic - GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages. Both GitHub and GitLab enable you to host static websites for free and under your own domain. With this in mind we can even generate a website for our research data and share that website with our peers. This allows us to present our data in a friendlier way and obviously it is a lot more pretty and offers many more opportunities of presenting our data.
For more information on how one would accomplish this take a look at the Coscine community project called Coscine Static Site Generator.