NIH Initiative Seeks to Improve Access to NIH-Funded Data

The National Institutes of Health Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) has launched an initiative to improve access to NIH-funded data. The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) is intended to supplement the domain-specific repositories that are critical components of the NIH biomedical data ecosystem for data sharing.

The GREI builds on the findings from the 2019-2020 NIH Figshare pilot and an NIH workshop on the role of generalist repositories to enhance data discoverability and reuse. The one-year pilot involving the Figshare repository was to determine how biomedical researchers may use a generalist repository for sharing and reusing NIH-funded data.

NIH said its overarching goal is to support a more seamless repository ecosystem to ensure that data and other digital objects resulting from NIH research can be stored and shared with the research community. While NIH encourages the use of domain-specific or institutional repositories where available, not all data sets have a logical home in one of these repositories. The pilot allowed ODSS to test the need for and utility of a generalist repository to fill these gaps in the biomedical data repository landscape.

The GREI includes six established generalist repositories that will work together to establish consistent metadata, develop use cases for data sharing, train and educate researchers on FAIR data and the importance of data sharing, and more.

This initiative will also aim to improve discoverability of data within and across participating generalist repositories and lead to greater reproducibility and reuse of data.

The six GREI repositories are:

• Dryad
• Dataverse
• Figshare
• Mendeley Data
• Open Science Framework
• Vivli