Webinar on March 24 on Publishing Datasets in the NIH Figshare Instance

A free webinar for researchers will be held March 24 from 3-4 p.m. ET to learn about publishing datasets in the NIH Figshare Instance.

NIH-funded researchers are encouraged to appropriately share research data to enhance the rigor and reproducibility of research results and for secondary reuse. NIH has a vision for a modernized, integrated biomedical data ecosystem that is outlined in its Strategic Plan for Data Science. A goal of the strategic plan is to support NIH-funded data that is FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable), and a central theme is to enhance data sharing and access.

To enable FAIR data-sharing, NIH currently supports many domain-specific repositories— repositories dedicated to a specific disease, data type, or research community. When data don’t logically align with a domain-specific repository, researchers have multiple generalist repository options that they may use. NIH is assessing the role these generalist repositories play in supporting appropriate FAIR data sharing in NIH-funded research. NIH recognizes that it’s not feasible to share all research data, but it is important to appropriately share data that enhance rigor and reproducibility and further scientific knowledge and discovery.

As part of this assessment, we’ve launched the NIH Figshare instance, a pilot project with generalist repository Figshare. It’s available for all NIH-funded researchers to share research data for which domain-specific repositories don’t exist, data that underlie publication figures and tables, or useful data that are unassociated with publications.

To learn more about how you can leverage generalist repositories such as NIH Figshare to publish your datasets, register for our webinar on Tuesday, March 24 from 3:00-4:00 p.m. ET. For those unable to attend live, a recording will be available on the Office of Data Science Strategy’s Biomedical Data Repositories and Knowledgebases webpage after the event.

For more information about the NIH Fighare pilot or to share your questions, ideas, or suggestions, please email the Office of Data Science Strategy at datascience@nih.gov. For technical support using NIH Figshare, email nihsupport@figshare.com.