Open Resarch Data

GitHub template for FAIR and open research data

This GitHub template is independent of the (research) data and its format. It follows the best practices for open research data as outlined in The Turing Way. It uses GitHub Actions to manage releases, issues, and pull requests, GitHub Pages for documentation, and Zenodo for long-term archiving.

GitHub issues GitHub forks GitHub stars Code license Data license DOI

Why use a template (even for small datasets)?

How this template helps you

Open research data

  • Citeable via DOI (and CITATION.cff)
  • Automatic long-term archiving via Zenodo
  • Licensed under a non-restrictive AGPL 3.0 and CC BY 4.0 license according to The Turing Way
  • Templates for reporting data issues using a custom template github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/data_issue_report.yml

Documentation

Consistency

Security

Ethics

Installation

We recommend using GitHub Codespaces for a reproducible setup.

Getting Started

For Most Users: Reproducible Setup with GitHub Codespaces

  1. Use this repository with your GitHub account.

    Use the repository

  2. Click the green <> Code button at the top right of this repository.

  3. Select the “Codespaces” tab and click “Create codespace on main. GitHub will now build a container that includes:

    • ✅ Node.js (via npm)
    • ✅ Python with uv
    • ✅ R with renv
    • ✅ Quarto

    Create Codespace

  4. Once the Codespace is ready, open a terminal and preview the documentation:

    uv run quarto preview

    Terminal window showing command

Note: All dependencies (Node.js, Python, R, Quarto) are pre-installed in the Codespace.

👩‍💻 Advanced Local Installation

Prerequisites

Note: uv installs and manages the correct Python version automatically.

Local Setup Steps

# 1. Install Node.js dependencies
npm install
npm run prepare

# 2. Setup Python environment
uv sync

# 3. Setup R environment
Rscript -e 'install.packages("renv"); renv::restore()'

# 4. Preview documentation
uv run quarto preview

Project Setup Checklist (for all users)

After creating your project from this template (either via Codespaces or local setup), complete the following steps to customize and finalize your project:

Optional:

Use

Check that all files are properly formatted.

npm run check

Format all files.

npm run format

Run the wizard to write meaningful commit messages.

npm run commit

Run the wizard to create a CHANGELOG.md.

npm run changelog

Preview the documentation.

quarto preview

Support

This project is maintained by @maehr. Please understand that we can’t provide individual support via email. We also believe that help is much more valuable when it’s shared publicly, so more people can benefit from it.

Type Platforms
🚨 Bug Reports GitHub Issue Tracker
📊 Report bad data GitHub Issue Tracker
📚 Docs Issue GitHub Issue Tracker
🎁 Feature Requests GitHub Issue Tracker
🛡 Report a security vulnerability See SECURITY.md
💬 General Questions GitHub Discussions

Roadmap

There are currently no changes planned.

Contributing

Please see CONTRIBUTING.md for details on our code of conduct and the process for submitting pull requests.

Authors and credits

See also the list of contributors who contributed to this project.

License

The data in this repository is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License - see the LICENSE-CCBY file for details. By using this data, you agree to give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and to indicate if any modifications have been made.

The code in this repository is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 - see the LICENSE-AGPL file for details. By using this code, you agree to make any modifications available under the same license.

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