Using 59 HKU students undertaking the data curation module of the Master of Science in Library and Information Management (MLIM) course taught by some of the GigaScience team, a crowdsourced literature curation exercise was carried out to assess the data availability of HKU's papers published in PLOS One and Scientific Reports journals between 2016-2018. This experiment can be continued at other institutions, and has been presented to allow a teacher of a similar course to set this up for their own students.This collection includes protocols for teachers trying to set up this exercise at a different university, and the protocol for the individual students carrying it out. Alongside a spreadsheet to input the results.