Establishing a FAIR Biomedical Data Ecosystem: The Role of Generalist Repositories to Enhance Data Discoverability and Reuse Workshop

The NIH aims to develop a unified strategy to support effective data sharing through both domain-specific and generalist/institutional repositories. The NIH has a strong history of supporting domain-specific biomedical data repositories that support data sharing for specific scientific communities or types of data. To establish a more comprehensive FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) biomedical data ecosystem, the NIH is investigating the roles of generalist and institutional data repositories in the biomedical data repository landscape. Both generalist and institutional repositories address the needs of researchers by providing data sharing solutions when no appropriate domain-specific repositories exist.

The primary goals of this workshop are to:

• Hear from generalist repositories about how they see themselves in the larger biomedical data repository landscape.
• Understand from institutional data repositories how they are creating suites of solutions for their researchers and how they see generalist repositories fitting in this landscape. 
• Consider the desired characteristics of data repositories and how they relate to institutional expectations of data storage/preservation solutions.
• Explore the adoption of common infrastructure, standards, and federated search solutions to enable greater discoverability of NIH research data across federated data repositories. 
• Address the role of data curators in ensuring that data and metadata are sufficiently well-curated to enhance discovery and enable reuse.