Pilot for Establishing Infrastructure for Publicly-Released Federally-Funded Research Data

Executive Summary

Efforts to make federally funded research publications publicly available have outpaced similar efforts regarding research data. Several differences between publications and data may explain the difference in pacing. Publication formats are sufficiently standardized to allow PubMed Central to store and curate more than four million publicly available publications. While all publications in PubMed Central can be accessed with standard pdf reading software, data may require one or more of any number of applications such as Excel or Extensible Markup Language (XML) readers. In 2013, the Office of Science and Technology Policy issued a policy recommendation to require public release of research products (publications and data) that arise from research grants issued by the National Institutes of Health, Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Agency for Health Research and Quality, Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response, and the Administration for Community Living. The publication policy is universally implemented but the data requirement is not. This team is gathering publicly released datasets and conducting interviews to identify specific challenges to the HHS public access policy for data.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

Daniel Janes (Project Lead), NIH
Wanda Jones, OS
Hope Hongzhu He,  AHRQ

Milestones

January 2017: Project selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
February 2017: Time in the Accelerator began