Subject and Data Librarians Collaborating to Reach the School of Medicine About the 2023 NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing

Background: NIH grant data sharing expectations are changing with the arrival of a new Final NIH Policy for Data Management (NIH DMS) in January 2023. This change demands awareness-building support from both data management and subject liaison librarians. The new NIH DMS policy includes several issues designed to promote “culture change” in data and reproducibility behaviors by faculty. To make faculty aware and start supporting this culture change, we have started an awareness and training partnership. We will report on this partnership between our research data librarian, medical librarian, and basic sciences librarian.

Description: Building on our existing strategic coordination of our liaison services this is a focused outreach program. While the libraries will attempt to reach all NIH-funded stakeholders to talk about NIH DMS policy, departments in the School of Medicine (SOM) need special attention because of their wide variety, reliance on the NIH as a major source of funding, and particular researcher pressures. We organized our outreach program into the following phases: analysis of NIH DMS policy by research data librarian, engagement with university-wide research deans, creation of brief educational materials and learning objects, targeted outreach to key programs and personnel, broad outreach to the SOM research community through programming and instruction.

Conclusion: Our program measures at this time include counts of outreach invitations, training sessions held, and range of stakeholders we have reached. We have specific strategic targets that we count as particular successes, such as invitations by the associate dean of research and other research leaders in the SOM. We will share our successes and challenges so far, so that session attendees will come away with ideas for how to raise awareness of the NIH Data Sharing Policy to both clinical and basic science units in their own schools of medicine.