Data Publication and Discovery

Globus services deliver the capabilities you need to make your data broadly discoverable and accessible.


Federal mandates and research reproducibility pressures make it imperative that data are properly catalogued and easily searchable by partners, collaborators, and even the general public. Using the Globus platform, you can describe data and build powerful search capabilities, making it easy to deliver on data management plans and other data publication requirements.

Data portals at the Argonnne Leadership Computing Facility use Globus to make diverse data sets broadly accessible.

Why use Globus to publish data?

In a nutshell: simplicity, flexibility, and accessibility.

  • Describe data using specific and relevant metadata, without being constrained by formal schemas and ontologies.
  • Ensure compliance by controlling access to both data and metadata.
  • Automate data ingest into multiple search indexes to meet even the most complex publication requirements.
  • Easily associate persistent identifiers like DOIs, to support permanent accessibility.
  • Integrate metadata management and search into your data portal, science gateway, data commons, or other research application.
  • Enable broad access using build-in federated authentication and access control.
  • Leverage existing storage—both on premises and in the cloud—for your data repositories.

Creating your data publication solution

Globus provides all the pieces necessary to create a data portal, commons or other application for distributing data.

  • The Globus Search service enables metadata management with fine grained access control on creation, modification, and visibility, and retrieval using simple queries and faceted search.
  • Globus data sharing policies make it easy to open up your data to the world—or lock it down and restrict access to a select, authorized few.
  • Globus managed file transfer moves data securely and reliably between source systems and publication repositories, and allows users to easily download the datasets they discover.
  • Globus Flows allow you to automate any part or all of the data publication process.
  • The Globus Auth service lowers barriers to access through federated login and access control.

A growing best practice for building data repositories is to adopt the Modern Research Data Portal (MRDP) design pattern. You can jumpstart development of your own repository by using the Globus Django data portal framework, which implements the MRDP design pattern.