Creating a permanent URL to put in a publication

Maybe Zenodo or other "Academic Data Repository". Googling this would give you a list. Zenodo have some advantages.

  1. Gives you a DOI, Digial Object Identifier, a unique link and a academic standard for citations.
  2. You don't need acceptance to publish your data.
  3. Is a official EU project, used for giving research grants in Open AIRE project.
  4. Is hosted by CERN.
  5. Runs free software in the entire stack.

If you also have some code associated with this data that you might like to share, another option might be GitHub. You wouldn't host the 12GB dataset in a GitHub repository itself; instead you would host your code, and create a readme.md file (GitHub will do this virtually automatically for you) where you write out instructions or other narrative. This is where you would include a link to wherever you've chosen to host the data. You can then update this link any time you want or need (for example, if you change institutions).

This has a number of advantages over simply finding a static place to stick the data and sharing that link:

  1. GitHub is almost a decade old and has over 20 million users, so it's not going anywhere
  2. Public repositories are free
  3. Including any code you want to share in the same place is very convenient
  4. The readme.md lets you write out whatever message you would like a future user to encounter, such as guidance not included in the original paper, errata, etc.
  5. Everything is updatable by you at any time, but still maintains the static link
  6. Using version control on your code is a fantastic habit to form
  7. GitHub makes it very easy to include copyright and licensing info
  8. You can use GitHub to build an entire website if you want to go that route (GitHub Pages), which can include what you've shared

There are services that provide enough to support 12 GB of data. For example, Figshare provides 20 GB of free space (file size limit 5 GB) for private storage and apparently unlimited public space. They state they can support larger files but not through user upload.

When you publish data you can assign a doi to the data set (this can actually be done much earlier in the process as a reserved number). Many journals also use Figshare (and likely other services) for their "Supporting information" as well. I do not know if adding such information is associated with costs.

I am only familiar (not associated) with Figshare and do not know limitations of other similar services so see this as an example. Also look in to the possibility to add the data as supporting information to your article.