This Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) solicits competitive revision applications that focus on data reuse and secondary data analysis in NIH-funded data repositories and knowledgebases to advance scientific inquiry and address health research questions.
Background
National Institutes of Health (NIH) acknowledges the significant role of data in the current health research landscape. The NIH’s Strategic Plan for Data Science highlights enhancing the data science infrastructure and fostering a data ecosystem that encourages discovery, use, and reuse of data. With this NOSI, NIH hopes to encourage data reuse research activities and enrich NIH’s data resource infrastructure potentially through the data reuse experiences of funded investigators.
Support for data reuse and secondary data analysis has emerged as a strategy that benefits researchers, particularly those in the early stages of their careers or at institutions with limited resources. Previously, data reuse and secondary data analysis were hindered by limited data availability and poor documentation. However, with NIH’s ongoing efforts for data sharing, the expansion of NIH data and resource sharing requirements, and the establishment of data documentation and metadata standards, the landscape has significantly transformed. These initiatives have amplified the volume and quality of data available for data reuse and secondary data analysis.
Maximizing the effective use and reuse of stored data is pivotal to fully harness the potential of data resources. This is particularly relevant in the context of secondary analysis, which involves reusing existing data and can lead to the discovery of new insights. The FAIR principles, which stand for findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable, serve as a guiding framework for this process. Adherence to these principles can not only strengthen research reproducibility, a fundamental aspect of scientific advancement, but also augment the utility and impact of NIH-funded data resources. Ultimately, promoting data reuse and secondary analysis is vital for magnifying the effectiveness and impact of NIH-funded research and data resources, thereby propelling the field of health research forward.