- Course overview
- Search within this course
- Examples of publicly available databases
- Data management for publicly available data
- Licences and data reuse
- Programmatic access
- Sharing your data
- Further learning
- Your feedback
- References
All materials are free cultural works licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license, except where further licensing details are provided.
What is publicly available data?
Publicly available data in the life sciences is data gathered from experiments that researchers make available for anyone to use and analyse.
After researchers generate data, they submit it to a data resource where the data is archived, classified and shared with others. The data cycle (figure 1) shows how this process allows the data to be further analysed and reused, which in turn allows for further data to be generated.
Why do people share data?
- Continuity of access
- Reliability and reproducibility
- Allow others to analyse the data – others may think of other questions to ask of the data
- Sharing with the wider community – both funders and publishers often require this!
Continue on to the next page where we will think about why people use publicly available data.