Do I need to collect new data for every analysis or question I want to answer?

Describing relationships encountered in the universe and answering questions associated with them tends to require the empirical observation of data. Usually a lot of data. Collecting this data often requires a substantial budget and institutional resources. But once collected and stored, these data might be the basis for answering questions that the collector may not have originally intended to answer. Data recycling saves resources, and enables research to be conducted in a low-barrier format. Recycling means using old data that was originally used to solve one problem to draw inferences about new emerging problems. To enable this process, it seems essential to provide open access to data whenever possible and ethically responsible.

In the following a short list of databases in which petabytes of publicly available open access datasets can be found: