2023 NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing

For information about the NIH Policy that will be effective on January 2023, visit the page NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy 2023.

For information about the previous NIH policy, read below.

NIH Policy & Resources

The NIH has long required the sharing of research results. An update (Feb. 2013) on the NIH’s public access policy from the NIH's Deputy Director for Extramural Research is here. In summary, the following changes apply:

“For non-competing continuation grant awards with a start date of July 1, 2013 or beyond:

1) NIH will delay processing of an award if publications arising from it are not in compliance with the NIH public access policy.

2) Investigators will need to use My NCBI to enter papers onto progress reports.  Papers can be associated electronically using the RPPR, or included in the PHS 2590 using the My NCBI generated PDF report.

Please see NOT-OD-12-160 for more details.”

You may also be interested in the recent release of the Public Access Compliance Monitor, “a web-based tool that institutions can use to track compliance of publications that fall under the NIH Public Access Policy. By providing efficient and flexible methods for retrieving, viewing, and organizing public access compliance information, the compliance monitor supports the efforts of grantee organizations to ensure their awards are compliant.”
 

Data Sharing Guidelines and Guidance

The information below is sourced from the NIH web site. In their document “NIH Data Sharing Policy and Implementation Guidance,” the following is stated:

“Investigators seeking $500,000 or more in direct costs in any year should include a description of how final research data will be shared, or explain why data sharing is not possible. It is expected that the data sharing discussion will be provided primarily in the form of a brief paragraph immediately following the Research Plan Section of the PHS 398 application form (i.e., immediately after I. Letters of Support), and would not count towards the application page limit. 

Data Sharing Plan (to follow immediately after the Research Plan Section)

The precise content of the data-sharing plan will vary, depending on the data being collected and how the investigator is planning to share the data. Applicants who are planning to share data may wish to describe briefly the expected schedule for data sharing, the format of the final dataset, the documentation to be provided, whether or not any analytic tools also will be provided, whether or not a data-sharing agreement will be required and, if so, a brief description of such an agreement (including the criteria for deciding who can receive the data and whether or not any conditions will be placed on their use), and the mode of data sharing (e.g., under their own auspices by mailing a disk or posting data on their institutional or personal website, through a data archive or enclave). Investigators choosing to share under their own auspices may wish to enter into a data-sharing agreement.”

DMPTool provides a DMP template for NIH proposals, and we highly recommended utilizing it.

See also the NIH Data Sharing Policy page, which includes several resources and links to important information. The document “Key Elements to Consider in Preparing a Data Sharing Plan Under NIH Extramural Support” is particularly useful. For information on data and metadata standards in your field, see the “Data Standards and Common Data Elements Resource Guide.”