Ten Simple Rules for Using Public Biological Data for Your Research

With an increasing amount of "omics" data available publicly, there is a need for a guide on how to successfully download and use this data. The 10 simple rules for using public data are: 1) use public data in your research, 2) evaluate data for your use case, 3) check data reuse requirements and embargoes, 4) be aware of ethics for data reuse, 5) plan for data storage and compute requirements, 6) know what you are downloading, 7) download programmatically and verify integrity, 8) properly cite data, 9) make data FAIR and share, and 10) make pipelines and code FAIR and share. These rules are intended as a guide for researchers wanting to make use of available data and to increase data reuse and reproducibility.