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.

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.