“Beginning with the first funding deadlines in January, all NIH grant proposals will be required to include a formal, two-page Data Management and Sharing Plan (DMSP), which must include the following elements….

Crucially, in addition to adding a required DMSP, the data management strategies stated in the plan will be audited and monitored externally, and compliance with stated plans may affect the funding status of grants.

Fortunately, here at Harvard affiliates have access to a variety of computing infrastructure and systems to effectively manage and steward a wide range of research outputs associated with modern, data-driven, computational research.

Harvard’s libraries, Harvard University Information Technology (HUIT), Research Computing, and Sponsored Programs offices have all been adding services and building capacity to support researchers complying with this new policy next year.

In the resources section below, we’ve included links to an executive summary of the policy and a collection of FAQs that we created specifically for Harvard users. We’ve also included resources from the NIH designed to support researchers writing and implementing a DMSP for the 2023 funding cycles.

Along with the requirement to make research data publicly available, in its new policy the NIH strongly encourages the use of established data repositories. When selecting an appropriate repository, researchers should plan to utilize subject- or domain-specific repositories for their data types if possible. When a disciplinary repository does not exist, researchers should use generalist repositories that accept all data types. We’ve included information on Harvard Dataverse and other generalist repositories in the resources section below….”