(Apologies. I have a large backlog of developments that I want to share with the CNI community and I’ll be grouping several of them together in a series of postings over the coming days; some of these are very recent and some are a bit older, but still highly relevant.)
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Office of data Science Strategy has launched a new Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative; this is an important step in the evolution of the NIH strategy to develop both specialist data repositories and a complementary ecosystem of “generalist” repositories, and I think is highly suggestive of the evolutionary trajectory of at least scientific research data management more broadly. It builds on earlier NIH-led efforts in this area, including a workshop on the role of generalist repositories that I shared earlier on CNI-announce.
In slightly older NIH related news, last week NIH held a workshop on dataset and repository search and discovery, a very important, difficult, and under-addressed issue. Here is the site, which includes the workshop agenda and background materials. I don’t know the schedule for availability of the workshop report, or if or when video of the workshop will be available, but will update here if I learn anything further. See:
https://web.cvent.com/event/9eec8239-babb-4beb-a0fe-45945e00bc4e/summary
Finally, in even older NIH material, there’s a call for comments to inform NIH’s revisions to their long-term genomic data sharing policy. This is an incredibly complex and fascinating set of policy questions that to my mind serve as a leading indicator for many questions how privacy plays out in large scale research data in the future. The issues here are worth thinking about, even if you are not directly involved in making these decisions; I think that the CNI community might provide some valuable perspectives here. The call is open till the end of February, 2022. See:
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-22-029.html
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
