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Research & Data Management Services: Reuse

This guide describes resources available at every step of the research lifecycle.

Why Share Our Data?

"Open Science is the principle and practice of making research products and processes available to all, while respecting diverse cultures, maintaining security and privacy, and fostering collaborations, reporducibility, and equity." 

Open science announcements from federal agencies. Science.gov. (2023, July 31). https://open.science.gov/#:~:text=Open%20Science%20is%20the%20principle,collaborations%2C%20reproducibility%2C%20and%20equity.

 

Open science supports reusable data.

Tools for Reusable Data

OpenRefine is a free downloadable tool which helps you clean and transfom your data sets.

  • Quickly make mass edits to fix spelling, formatting or other cell data.
  • Reproduce operations across data sets.
  • Preserve the original file with version control.
  • Securely process sensitive data locally.
  • Find similar entries with word clustering functions.

 

NLM-Scrubber is a free downloadable tool used for clinical text deidentification. Developed by the National Library of Medicine, the goal of this tool is to produce HIPAA compliant deidentified health information for scientific use.

  • Identifies HIPAA personal identifiers in a dataset.
  • Allows researchers access to medical data and protects patient privacy by deidentifying electronic medical records (EMRs).
  • Produces HIPAA-compliant datasets for scientific research, publication, and sharing.

Publishing Your Dissertation

Completing your dissertation is a major accomplishment, and it is very reasonable to want to take this scholarly work forward into publications.

When you complete your doctorate at MTSU, an electronic copy will be preserved in the library's institutional repository, JEWL Scholar. Generally publishers do not consider a dissertation housed in a library repository to be published. Additionally, dissertations available through ProQuest (as are MTSU dissertations) are not considered published. Therefore, you should not be viewed as self-plagiarizing if you take your dissertation and adapt it into an article. Remember that you as the author hold the copyright to your dissertation, not MTSU. 

That being said, there are several caveats to publishing content from your dissertation:

1) You should always check with the publisher of your target journal and inquire as to their specific policies on this practice before submitting your manuscript to them. The following link has a lot of different publishers and their policies: MIT Libraries: Thesis Content and Article Publishing

2) You will need to do significant work in transforming your dissertation into a readable journal article. Here are some good tips: APA: Adapting a Dissertation or Thesis into a Journal Article

3) Here are some additional guidelines on the practice of adapting a dissertation into a journal article (see the bottom of this government website, where it says "From Dissertation to Journal Article/Book and Vice Versa"). Basically you need to put a disclaimer in your manuscipt stating that it is based on your dissertation. Also you should include a citation to your dissertation in the references for the manuscript.