IMAGINE… the ability to link data in the Framingham Heart Study (NHLBI) with Alzheimer’s health data (NIA) to understand correlative effects in cardiovascular health with aging and dementia.

IMAGINE… the ability to link electronic health care records with personal data and with clinical and basic research data.

IMAGINE...the ability to quickly obtain access to data, and related information, from published articles.*

This is the promise of the NIH Strategic Vision for Data Science, a plan designed to making datasets resulting from NIH investigator publications.  more accessible. In order to address the difficulty at finding mutual specific and same repositories to share research datasets underlying publication figures and tables, or data not associated with a publication, the NIH has formed a partnership with Figshare.  This pilot is a way to make datasets resulting from NIH-funded research more accessible.

Data submitted to NIH Figshare will be reviewed to ensure there is no personally identifiable information in the data and metadata prior to being published and made discoverable. Review will also ensure the data and metadata are findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable – or aligned with the FAIR principles.

NIH Figshare provides NIH-funded researchers the following:

• The ability to self-publish any data type in any file format
• All data assigned a branded, citable Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
• All data associated with a license
• Ability to link grant information to published data
• Ability to embargo data
• Open access to all published data
• Data being indexed in Google and discoverable across search engines
• Usage metrics – including views, downloads, citations, and Altmetrics – tracked openly

Answers to  frequently asked questions:

• NIH Figshare is a one-year pilot program to test the usefulness of formally adding generalist data repositories to the NIH data ecosystem.
• Investigators will be able to store 100GB per user with the ability to request more.  
• Most file types can also be previewed in the browser, meaning others can see a visualization of the data on the item page without necessarily having to download the file(s). 
• NIH Figshare is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 to ensure the highest level of security for your research data. 

To learn more, visit the FAQs at https://nih.figshare.com/f/faq(link is external).

* NIH’s Strategic Vision for Data Science: Enabling a FAIR-Data Ecosystem
Susan Gregurick, Ph.D. Senior Advisor Office of Data Science Strategy