In 2003, the Human Genome Project created widespread excitement when it completed a map of human DNA. That moonshot also, indirectly, kicked off an era of unprecedented global collaborations. Dozens of other efforts soon got underway, each one trying to comprehensively map a dimension of the human body and make that information freely available to scientists around the world.

Some of those projects have wrapped up; many more are ongoing. Here are some of the more notable efforts to create medical reference works that will endure for decades to come.