Data Ecosystem

The landscape of biomedical data within and across NIH’s 27 institutes and centers (ICs) is vast, and the Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) is working with technical leaders of the ICs to promote a modernized data-resource ecosystem. The ODSS has three objectives to help researchers find, use, and share data more efficiently:

• Modernize the data repository ecosystem.
• Support the storage and sharing of individual datasets.
• Leverage ongoing initiatives to standardize data and adopt common data elements.

A guiding principle of the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, and the approach of the ODSS, is that all biomedical research data should adhere to FAIR principles. This means data should be findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR). While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, ODSS advocates for alignment to the FAIR principles across the biomedical research enterprise. 

• Workshops Supporting FAIR Data Principles

  Ensuring NIH-funded research data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) through workshops

• Biomedical Data Repositories and Knowledgebases

  Distinguishing between data resource types to support a modern data resource ecosystem

• Sequence Read Archive

  Petabytes of data now accessible on cloud service provider environments

• Exploring a Generalist Repository for NIH-funded Data

  Lessons learned from a one-year pilot project to determine how biomedical researchers may use a generalist repository for sharing and reusing NIH-funded data