Florence Hudson
Executive Director of the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub and Principal Investigator for the COVID Information Commons
Columbia University
The COVID Information Commons (CIC) [https://covidinfocommons.net/] was created in 2020 through a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID award to provide an open resource to explore NSF-funded research addressing the COVID-19 pandemic. When the CIC was presented at the Fall 2020 CNI Membership Meeting [https://www.cni.org/topics/economic-models/the-covid-information-commons] there were 723 NSF COVID research awards in the CIC. Through an NSF CIC-Extension award in 2021, the CIC has grown to include over 9,900 NSF and NIH-funded COVID-related research awards and researcher and student programs to enable research collaboration. The CIC has hosted 25 Researcher Lightning Talk webinars since July 2020, with a total of 123 researcher presentations, and 10,600+ total viewers (YouTube and Live) from across the globe. The CIC Accessibility initiative has resulted in the 123 researcher presentation videos being transcribed into written English and translated into Universal Spanish. These transcripts are posted with the videos on the CIC website and, through our partnership with Columbia University Libraries, on the Columbia Academic Commons. The CIC Student Paper Challenge which began in 2021 inspires undergraduate, community college, and graduate students from around the world to conduct COVID research and submit papers to be judged and awarded certificates, along with the opportunity to present on a researcher lightning talk webinar. Winners hail from across the US and South Africa. We look forward to the continued growth of the CIC, including new metadata and data search and discovery mechanisms, and the leverage of DRYAD to archive the uniquely integrated NSF + NIH COVID research corpus from the pandemic.