- 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.
Why use publicly available data?
There are many reasons to use publicly available biological data. Here are some of our reasons:
- Someone may have already generated data that is useful to you, saving you time and resources, and potentially allow for more environmentally ‘green’ research. Maybe it is not even possible for you to create such data.
- Much of the data generated is only used to answer one or two very specific questions, yet it is potentially valuable to many others. You may have a question no one else has considered yet!
- Using others’ data can lead to new collaborations.
 Can you think of any other advantages to using publicly available data? |