Starting on Jan. 25, 2023, many of the 2,500 institutions and 300,000 researchers that the U.S. National Institutes of Health supports will need to provide a formal, detailed plan for publicly sharing the data generated by their research. For many in the scientific community, this new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy sounds like a no-brainer.
The incredibly quick development of rapid tests and vaccines for COVID-19 demonstrate the success that can follow the open sharing of data within the research community. The importance and impact of that data even drove a White House Executive Order mandating that “the heads of all executive departments and agencies” share “COVID-19-related data” publicly last year.
I am the Director of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s Open Programs Office. At Open@RIT, my colleagues and I work with faculty and researchers to help them openly share their research and data in a manner that provides others the rights to access, reuse and redistribute that work with as few barriers or restrictions a possible. In the sciences, these practices are often referred to as open data and open science.
The journal Nature has called the impact of the NIH’s new data management policy “seismic,” saying that it could potentially create a “global standard” for data sharing. This type of data sharing is likely to produce many benefits to science, but there also are some concerns over how researchers will meet the new requirements.
The National Institutes of Health has had data-sharing guidelines in place for years, but the new rules are by far the most comprehensive.
NIH
What to share and how to share it
The NIH’s new policy around data sharing replaces a mandate from 2003. Even so, for some scientists, the new policy will be a big change. Dr. Francis S. Collins, then Director of the NIH, said in the 2020 statement announcing the coming policy changes that the goal is to “shift the culture of research” so that data sharing is the norm, rather than the exception.“
Specifically, the policy requires two things. First, that researchers share all the scientific data that other teams would need in order to “validate and replicate” the original research findings. And second, that researchers include a two-page data management plan as part of their application for any NIH funding.
So what exactly is a data management plan? Take an imaginary study on heat waves and heatstroke, for example. All good researchers would collect measurements of temperature, humidity, time of year, weather maps, the health attributes of the participants and a lot of other data.
Starting next year, research teams will need to have determined what reliable data they will use, how the data will be stored, when others would be able to get access to it, whether or not special software would be needed to read the data, where to find that software and many other details – all…
