We’re excited to introduce a new blog post category in Research Data Management (RDM) as part of the RDM Services the Library is offering! We’ll be inaugurating this new category with a series of posts in the coming weeks dedicated to some of the developments in open data resources and tools in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Research Data and COVID-19

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many researchers with limited access to their laboratories have been turning to publicly available datasets with which they can run their own analysis, provide their own insights, or combine with their original research data to identify new trends. While the remote-work model creates plenty of challenges for researchers, it also presents a unique opportunity to highlight the value of data sharing on a global scale.

Data reuse certainly comes with a variety of limits and caveats, such as properly citing data sources, protecting human subjects by providing adequate levels of de-identification and removal of PHI, ensuring credit for data creators, etc. Despite these challenges, many funding agencies, publishers, and scientific organizations encourage data sharing. In fact, during this global pandemic, many researchers in the private and public sectors are choosing to share their datasets through collaborative discovery platforms and open source repositories. Even many traditionally for-pay repositories and publishers have been developing open-access discovery platforms to assist researchers in finding and reusing COVID-19 datasets. 

In the next RDM post on COVID-19 data resources, we’ll showcase some of the NLM/NIH initiatives to support open datasets, resources, and tools.