Data Submission Process

Data Submission Overview

When Should You Contact FaceBase?

We recommend filling out the Data Submission Form (see below) once your grant is funded and even as you’re generating your data (ie, sooner than later).

Advantages include:

  • We can help you organize your data as you are collecting it to make uploading easier in the future.
  • We also encourage entering your metadata even before you’re ready to upload your data to make the process run more smoothly.
  • Helps “future proof” your data management process. Many times, the member of your lab who generated the data may not still be available once it’s time to publish.
  • We will be able to provide proper data citations for your publication. You do not have to upload your data until your publication is released, but we can still generate Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for your datasets before you submit your publication.

Before You Begin

If you have not already submitted data for your current project or investigation, please make a request for review of your upcoming data submission. The request will be reviewed by a committee for FaceBase. Notification of approval to submit data to FaceBase should take no more than about 2 weeks.

  1. Review the page How to Submit Data and follow its link to the “Data Submission Form” and fill it out. Note that this form is for grants that have been funded.
  2. The Hub will contact you within approximately 2 weeks with a decision on your data submission request.
  3. Upon approval, the Hub will setup a Project record on FaceBase and send you a link to create a FaceBase account (if you do not already have one) and to join your new Project. We also encourage scheduling a one-on-one tutorial with us to discuss specific details for your project.

You may then begin the data submission process described next.

Data Submission Process

The process for submitting data will generally include the following steps (in this order):

  1. Create a Dataset entry
  2. Create Experiment, Biosample, and Replicate entries
  3. Upload data files
  4. Finally, review and revise your dataset:
    • Review your completed datasets with your collaborators, PI or Co-PIs. Your data is only viewable by your project until the Hub releases it.
    • Notify the Hub at help@facebase.org to release your datasets to the public.
    • The Hub reviews and may have questions or suggestions about your entries to help make them more discoverable.
    • The Hub releases the datasets once they have gone through final Quality Control review and at this point, the dataset is viewable by the public.

IMPORTANT Your datasets are not released until the Hub reviews them and updates their release status. Until the Hub has released your datasets, they are not visible and usable by the public.

So once you have joined the right group and are logged in to the FaceBase Data Browser, you are ready to get started with Creating a Dataset.

Submitting Human Subjects Data (Controlled Access Data)

Please see the data access policy on the FaceBase site, regarding what data are classified as ‘controlled access’ (human subjects) data. Do not upload any ‘controlled access’ data to the FaceBase site. Instead, if you have controlled access data that is of interested to FaceBase, please make that clear during the approval process and the Hub will provide you with special instructions for handling of human subjects data.

For sequencing experiments involving human subjects data (even if your IRB classifies it as not human subjects data), you must only submit your raw sequencing data (i.e., fastq files) through the human subjects data submission protocol. However, we encourage you to submit your track data files that contain only frequencies or genomic positions through the online tools for display in our genome browser.

If you have already deposited your data at dbGaP, or another similar repository, you should include the dbGaP accession numbers for the relevant data in the “Related Datasets” field of your Dataset entries on FaceBase.