Very true, but if you're planning on expanding the work of a small, pilot study like that and you don't have the people who were involved in the original you pr

Very true, but if you're planning on expanding the work of a small, pilot study like that and you don't have the people who were involved in the original you probably need to recreate the study (to shake out the kinks in the protocol, confirm results for yourself, etc). It would be challenging to find a solution robust enough for CERN type data but also simple enough for an n=3 undergraduate research project (that may have yielded some interesting results). I don't know what the solution is there. My intuition is that university libraries could be involved, and that a data librarian could help you get your small study into shape or be embedded at a percentage effort on a large study.