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-purpose.
Data catalogues
Apart from searching directly in repositories where life science data typically is shared (see the sharing phase), there are data catalogues where you can search and discover published data. Note that datasets might have been collected for completely different purposes and still serve your goals.
- Visit 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.
- The Swedish Reference Genome Portal can be used to discover non-human eukaryotic genome assemblies and genome annotations (co-)produced by researchers affiliated with a Swedish 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.
Resources
Please find below resources concerning the research data life cycle phase reuse in form of training, guidance and/or tools.
Training resources
Guiding resources
- Keynote: First FAIR steps, Rob Hooft
- RDMkit on Existing data
- RDMkit on Reusing data
- Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal
- The Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal one year on