Initiative Development and Strategic Planning at NIH

Summary

The NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) sought to support the community development of a standard set of capabilities, services, metrics, and infrastructure across NIH-supported repositories to simplify the sharing and reuse of data. BioTeam oversaw the NIH’s Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) from its inception through the completion of its first three years.

During this time, BioTeam facilitated efforts to develop shared capabilities across seven generalist repositories and foster the adoption of FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) principles. BioTeam fostered collaboration among seven competing repositories, developed reports and marketing materials, and coordinated annual meetings. GREI successfully achieved its goal of standardizing capabilities across participating repositories and supported the adoption of FAIR principles across biomedical research.

Services Provided:

• Initiative development and coordination services
• Strategic planning support
• Meeting facilitation
• Subcommittee support
• Organizational support

Challenge

To foster increased reproducibility and reuse of scientific data, ODSS recognized that changes were needed in how NIH-funded data was shared. Achieving this required collaboration among seven competing generalist repositories: Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, OSF, Vivli, and Zenodo.

These competitors needed to align around shared goals:

• Simplify data sharing
• Enhance data discoverability
• Ensure data accessibility
• Prevent data duplication
• Encourage researchers to be contributors and consumers of data

This required bringing these groups together for ongoing discussions, meetings, and workshops to determine how to make these ambitious goals a reality.

Approach

BioTeam provided industry experts in data management, project management, and life sciences to coordinate and oversee the work of the seven repositories. With meticulous attention to detail and the ability to adapt to changing priorities, BioTeam supported annual meetings and subcommittees, driving organizational efforts and enabling seamless collaboration.

BioTeam advanced GREI’s objectives through the following key activities:

• Liaison and Coordination:
  • Acted as a liaison between ODSS and representatives from the seven repositories
  • Coordinated with subcommittees on critical focus areas such as metadata
• Community Engagement and Communication:
  • Organized webinars and meetings to gather community feedback
  • Developed internal and external-facing presentations
  • Created marketing materials to promote community events
• Reporting and Progress Monitoring:
  • Delivered reports and status updates to stakeholders
  • Tracked task completion for each repository
  • Monitored overall progress against annual goals

Outcomes

Through BioTeam’s support, seven generalist repositories collaborated within GREI, achieving standardization of capabilities across repositories and laying the groundwork for continued cooperation. The capabilities developed as part of this initiative have made sharing and accessing data easier and provided a model for other repositories to follow.

Although work is ongoing, the following objectives have already been implemented by all seven repositories:

• Use of seven key metadata fields
• Free-text search functionality similar to a search engine
• Links to related articles and scholarly outputs
• Submission of scholarly outputs to DataCite