Seeking Input on the Need to Enhance Access to NIH Grants Data

NIH has long been committed to transparency into who and what we fund. We have previously discussed the value of freely-available web tools that allow you to gain insight into NIH funding decisions. Award data available via RePORT and RePORTER, for instance, include non-sensitive information such as awardee institution, principal investigator, funding levels, research abstracts, as well as associated publications, patents, and other project outcomes. Better yet, if you want to see all of these data all at once, then ExPORTER allows you to download over 25 years’ worth of such non-sensitive NIH grant award data. Researchers have used this grant information in creative and thought-provoking ways to explore NIH funding decisions. For example, both Fang, Bowen, and Casadevall as well as Li and Agha analyzed post-award research productivity according to pre-award peer review scores. Li, Azoulay, and Sampat linked publications resulting from NIH awards to patents. Boris et al used RePORTER data to verify self-reported awards in the dermatology field.  Cleary et al used RePORTER data to show that all recent new drug approvals were in some meaningful way linked to NIH funding.  And as I wrote in this 2017 post, Katz and Matter looked at some NIH data and described what they saw as inequality and stasis in the biomedical enterprise. The data available through RePORT are quite powerful in their own right. However, compelling arguments exist for why researchers outside NIH s...
Source: NIH Extramural Nexus - Category: Research Authors: Tags: blog Open Mike Administrative Data Data enclave RFI Source Type: funding