10 Visibility
10.1 Related materials
palmerpenguins is a good example of a dataset that has a logo and related artwork.7 The dataset is released under CC-0. The artwork is by allison_horst.
palmerpenguins R package’s logo
Sometimes your data may be very specific, and there can be concepts that are not obvious to many who still could be interested about them. If your dataset is really good and useful, people may want to use it in teaching. It is not a bad idea to make this as easy as possible.
Educational art material about penguin culmen length and depth are measured
Important message here is also that we do not need to be boring all the time with our data.
10.3 Mailing lists
If your field has some mailing list where most of the researchers are, then if a major new dataset in your field is created, it is very recommendable to send an email about this. Lots of this work is really relevant for a small research community, and no matter how findable our data is, if nobody knows to search for it they will not end up using it.
10.4 Recommend it to your students
It can be a be really strong model to foster new research if the datasets created by some older researchers are further used by their students in BA and MA thesis, and elsewhere. Research community is quite wild place with lots of weird people who have their own ideas of what they want to do. People may not gravitate toward your dataset no matter how good it is. But by advising your students to use it, and guiding them through the instructions and how to use it, it is certainly possible to create bit more vibrant research environment where the same materials are used in different studies from different angles.
10.2 Social media
It can be a good idea to let people know about your work through social media. I’m not an expert in this, but I assume I should also do this more myself.