The National Institutes of Health (NHI) published this last November 2019 a draft on data management and sharing policy related to public access and open science. The draft is an update of a former NIH’s policy, dated 2003, and it is focusing on the biomedical research, the access to scientist data, the respect of the privacy and autonomy of research participants, and the need to protect confidential/proprietary data. In its purpose, the NIH draft Policy reinforces NIH's longstanding commitment to making the results and outputs of the research that it funds and conducts available to the public, as data sharing enables researchers to rigorously test the validity of research findings, strengthen analyses through combined datasets, reuse hard-to-generate data, and explore new frontiers of discovery. NIH emphasizes the importance of good data management practices, which provide the foundation for effective data sharing and improve the reproducibility and reliability of research findings.
In addition, to promote effective and efficient data management and data sharing, NIH expects researchers to manage scientific data resulting from NIH-funded or conducted research and prospectively plan for which scientific data will be preserved and shared. Under this Policy, individuals and entities would be required to provide a Data Management and Sharing Plan (Plan) describing how scientific data will be managed, including when and where the scientific data will be preserved and shared, prior to initiating the research study. Shared data should be made accessible in a timely manner for use by the research community and the broader public. The NIH made a request for information (RFI) on potential key elements that could comprise a future NIH data management and sharing policy, and had received a lot of helpful feedback. Most commenters supported data sharing and the importance of prospectively planning for where, when, and how scientific data should be managed and shared.
