Diskover Life Science Edition

NIH DMS Requirements

As of January 25, 2023, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has released their new Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy^[1] governing the submission, sharing, and preservation of scientific data in order to accelerate biomedical research discovery, in part, by enabling validation of research results, providing accessibility to high-value datasets, and promoting data reuse for future research studies.

Therefore, all research institutes need to enhance their data management to meet the DMS Policy and comply with the NIH Institute, Center, or Office (ICO)-approved plans throughout the grant process:

• Grant Application: Prospectively plan for how scientific data will be shared and preserved, as well as submit the forecasted budget for data storage.
• Funding/Support Period: Tracking of data and its storage cost used for a specific grant funding, with NIH compliance oversight at any time, including the annual submission of the Research Performance Progress Report (RPPR)^[2] by grants’ recipients.
• Post-Funding: Shared scientific data should be made accessible as soon as possible, and no later than the time of an associated publication^[3], or the end of the award/grant period, whichever comes first. Non-compliance with the NIH ICO-approved Plans may be taken into account for future funding decisions.

[1] Complete NIH DMS Policy at https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-21-013.html

[2] https://grants.nih.gov/grants/rppr/index.htm

[3] The DMS Policy is designed to increase the sharing of scientific data, regardless of whether a publication is produced.

Diskover Provides Tools to Meet and Exceed the NIH DMS Requirements

The Life Science Edition of Diskover Data Management Software provides capabilities for research centers to meet the data management and sharing policies required by the NIH, while also ensuring prudent use of storage infrastructure to reduce grant infrastructure spending and shift these funds towards valuable research.

Research Data Management | Visibility Without Access

Diskover provides visibility without access to research data enabling the data technicians to associate data to appropriate grant numbers. The software harvests rich metadata from the selected storage repositories, therefore end-users have access to merely the indexes of files and not the files themselves, hence assuring the integrity of the research data. The Diskover solution provides mechanisms to associate grants’ metadata (grant number, group ID, etc.) to their respective datasets.

Data Storage Cost

Prudent data management eliminates unnecessary or wasteful storage usage, therefore reducing storage infrastructure costs to ensure funding dollars are used for actual research. Diskover has an integrated storage cost feature offering granular configuration and dedicated data cost per storage repository, in turn allowing for real-time data cost monitoring. The current challenge is to further associate those storage costs per grant which is addressed with the Diskover Grant Plugin.

Storage cost feature offering granular configuration and dedicated data cost per storage repository, in turn allowing for real-time data cost monitoring.

Indexing Architecture and Speed

Diskover’s open-source architecture is highly configurable and can be extended to answer current and future exigencies. The result is better performance for all users, as well as accelerated science research.

Diskover is naturally prepared to deal with scientific research generating enormous amounts of data as it uses Elasticsearch in its backend architecture. This open-source software is extremely powerful, fast, reliable, and can handle massive numbers of files. Diskover’s unique architecture allows for large-scale storage repositories to be scanned continuously and in parallel.