Additional Administrative Supplements Available to Support Enhancement of Software Tools for Open Science

The National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) recently announced the continuing availability of administrative supplements to active grants that focus on biomedical software development or have a significant software development component (NOT-OD-21-091). These supplements will invest in research software tools with recognized value in a scientific community to enhance their impact by leveraging best practices in software development and advances in cloud computing.

In 2020, 28 awards were made to principle investigators from 26 institutions across the country. Awards were funded by 12 different NIH institutes and centers, spanning a variety of topics such as biomolecular simulation, cloud commons, genomics, imaging, and more.

The supplements are intended to support collaborations between biomedical scientists and software engineers to enhance the design, implementation, and “cloud-readiness” of research software. Through these awards, ODSS intends to help researchers who have developed scientifically valuable software to make tools sustainable, contribute to open science, and take advantage of new data science and computing paradigms. A trans-NIH team is engaged in extending this opportunity to science funded by all NIH institutes and centers and encourages diversity of topic, institution, and personnel within the goal of improving software fundamentals.

This initiative is part of a plan to implement the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, which describes actions aimed at modernizing the biomedical research data ecosystem and making data findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – or FAIR – with high impact for open science.

Learn more about this Notice of Special Interest (NOT-OD-21-091) and apply by May 15. All inquiries may be directed to Fenglou Mao, Ph.D., at softwaresupplements@nih.gov.