This is part 2 of a 4 part series of posts on Research Data Management and COVID-19. Click here for part 1.
The National Institutes of Health and the National Library of Medicine have put together a broad spectrum of open-access resources to provide researchers and the public specific types of data, such as:
- genomic data (GEO Datasets, GenBank Protein and Nucleotide Sequences, and Sequence Read Archives),
- clinical trials,
- digital images (COVID Digital Pathology Resource),
- curated COVID literature (LitCovid, PubMed Central, iSearch).
They have also added COVID-specific features to many of their computing resources such as BLAST. These are just a few examples and they are continuing to add more datasets and research tools all the time. To find out more about their initiatives and get direct links to the individual data sources, they have compiled them into list at the Open-Access Data and Computational Resources to Address COVID-19.
Another very useful government resource for COVID-19 data is the result of a collaboration between The National Center for Data to Health (CD2H), the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA), and other partner institutions. They have worked together to introduce the National COVID Cohort Collaboration (N3C). Open to membership for individual researchers as well as institutions, they provide a “pathway to rapidly share collaborative results and get attribution for your contributions.” Among the products of this group is a searchable list of COVID-19 data sources which include datasets, visualizations, code, and informational websites from a variety of national and international institutions.
In the next post in this series, we’ll highlight some of the institutional collaborations supporting open science, visualization, and computational resources in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.