Reusing

It is not because we can generate massive amounts of data that we always need to do so. Creating data with public funding carries the responsibility to treat those data well and (if potentially useful) make them available for reuse by others, and the circle is only complete if such data is actually reused.

Before you decide to embark on a new study, it is nowadays good practice to check all options to reuse already existing data, either data collected or generated by yourself in an earlier project, or data from other research groups or government bodies. Existing data can be found by searching in different data repositories: discipline-specific, institutional as well as general. For example, search in the Swedish Pathogens Portal list of available data in order to find publications about COVID-19/SARS-CoV-2 that involve at least one author affiliated with a Swedish research institution.

Search in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data to find discipline-specific repositories for your field. The Swedish National Data Service (SND) research data catalogue can also be used to search for data from a variety of research disciplines. Note that datasets might have been collected for completely different purposes and still serve your goals.