National Institutes of Health

Recently, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) insisted on implementing a previously proposed new policy that would require its foreign partners in funding to regularly share laboratory records and other raw data.

Hundreds of researchers and related organizations protested, warning that the move could hinder international cooperation, especially with developing countries. Therefore, they urged the NIH to abandon or reduce the scope of the policy.

According to Science, although the final policy recently announced by NIH has some adjustments, such as sharing laboratory records and other raw data from once every few months to once a year, the rest is basically the same as the plan released in May. There is no difference and it is scheduled to take effect in October. This again sparked outrage among researchers.

Many U.S. researchers believe blanket requirements that all foreign grantees share experimental notes and the like go too far.

Some who work on infectious diseases and public health in places like Africa and Brazil argue that requiring the submission of all raw data, from handwritten field notes to audio recordings to patients who need to be identified, is expensive, cumbersome, unnecessary, and damage long-term cooperation.

Albert Ko, an infectious disease researcher at Yale University in the United States, and others published a comment in the New England Journal of Medicine on September 7, criticizing the above-mentioned new policy. In their commentary, they warned that the policy "sends a message that NIH does not trust scientists in other countries to meet the highest ethical and responsible standards required for research practice." Like some other researchers, they urged the NIH to limit implementation of the policy to certain areas of research, such as experiments with dangerous pathogens.

This policy change has also caused concern among researchers in Europe, Australia, Israel, Canada, and Japan. Some scientists pointed out that the NIH's new policy may conflict with European regulations protecting personal data and intellectual property.

(The original title is "US NIH insists on requiring foreign collaborators to share raw data")