January 2020
On January 10, AERA submitted comments to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in response to the agency’s draft Policy for Data Management and Sharing. NIH has a longstanding commitment to data sharing and has been engaged over the past few years in expanding on its 2003 Data Sharing Policy. NIH requested comments on various aspects of the policy, including its purpose, scope, requirements, and compliance and enforcement.
Along with the draft policy, NIH also sought comments on draft supplemental guidance documents on allowable costs and the elements of a data management and sharing plan. The draft guidance on allowable costs would offer NIH grant applicants an opportunity to include reasonable costs for curating data and developing supporting documentation, for preserving and sharing data through established repositories, and for local data management in their proposed budget requests.
AERA strongly supports the draft policy and the two guidance documents. AERA encouraged NIH to make the policy effective no later than one year after the final version is released. In addition, AERA suggested that a sentence calling for shared scientific data to be available “as long as it is deemed useful to the research community and the public” be revised to help inhibit data destruction.
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