A Blueprint for Including Digital Objects in the NIAID Data Ecosystem

In 2024, the Office of Data Science and Emerging Technologies (ODSET) initiated a project aiming to make NIAID data more accessible and promote its reuse, initially referred to as the ‘NIAID Landscaping and FAIRification Project.’ The project, led by ODSET and a team of global data sharing experts at GO FAIR US (GFU), leverages the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) Principles as a framework to improve the discovery, accessibility, and interoperability of digital objects (e.g. data, software, computational tools) across NIAID-funded repositories. To this end, NIAID and GFU engaged with 11 NIAID-supported repositories to identify consistent themes across all repositories. These findings informed the document, “A Blueprint for Including Digital Objects in the NIAID Data Ecosystem,” also called the NIAID Blueprint. The NIAID Blueprint includes recommendations for scientists and repositories to enhance metadata associated with scientific data generated in their lab or indexed in a data repository. When implemented, the NIAID Blueprint represents an instruction manual with potential to 1) increase the use of NIAID datasets, 2) align the depth and breadth of NIAID datatypes, 3) incentivize citation of data in publications, and 4) ensure core metadata is exposed across NIAID resources, supporting compatibility with the NIAID Data Ecosystem Portal.