NIH Wields Research Money to Force Scientists to Share Data

The NIH is flexing its $32 billion in research grants to compel scientists to share their data under a proposal unveiled Nov. 6.

The draft data sharing policy marks a major step for the National Institutes of Health to overhaul an academic culture that historically has viewed data as proprietary. While the NIH has taken steps to require sharing for specific types of data, such as genomic or clinical trial data, this is the first blanket statement that hits at all 650 petabytes of data—130 times the holdings of the Library of Congress—generated by NIH-funded research.

“Sharing scientific data ...