HEAL-compliant Repository Selection Guide
Per the 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, investigators should budget for fees associated with data management, curation, and preservation in their funding application!
Allowable costs include preserving and sharing data through established repositories, such as data deposition fees. Additional budgeting guidance for data sharing can be found in NOT-OD-21-015 and on the NIH Scientific Data Sharing website.
Resources:
HEAL investigators are, in most cases, required to share their HEAL-funded data, but the HEAL Data Platform itself does not host data. Instead, the HEAL Data Ecosystem uses appropriate, established long-term data storage repositories. To help HEAL investigators select a repository and meet their data sharing and FAIR data practices obligations, the HEAL Stewards evaluated and selected a number of HEAL-compliant repositories. The HEAL Stewards chose these compliant repositories from the NLM Data Sharing Resources lists and evaluated them based on HEAL compliant repository principles.
Generally, HEAL investigators who have access to a repository managed by their administering NIH Institute or Center (IC) should explore that option first. For further information, please read the NIH IC Section below. If this is not applicable, investigators should review the list to identify a repository well suited to the organism they are studying, the type of data they are producing, and/or a repository they have used in the past. Investigators should submit data to a discipline-specific repository, where possible, but may submit to a generalist repository if their data do not fit naturally into one of the compliant domain-specific repositories. If you feel the best repository for your data is not on the HEAL-compliant list, please contact the HEAL Stewards.
With HEAL investigator input, the HEAL Stewards will continue to work together with NIH to evaluate and update the list based on HEAL’s needs.
HEAL-compliant Repository List
The repositories below represent the most up-to-date list of compliant destinations for HEAL data. For more information about each repository, we provide direct links to repositories and re3data/FAIRsharing entries. Re3data is a global registry of research data repositories, providing objective summaries of repository attributes. FAIRsharing is a similar resource, providing curated and crowd-sourced descriptions and evaluations of repository features.
The HEAL Stewards ordered this list loosely by preference. In many cases, you should go down the list and select the first repository to which you are eligible to submit data and that accepts your data type.
Some NIH Institutes or Centers (ICs) require their HEAL investigators, or a subset of their HEAL investigators, to deposit their data in a repository managed by the IC. Be sure to check your Notice of Award language to see if your administering IC has a supporting repository.
When you contact the NDA help desk to establish a collection, indicate that you are associated with the NIH HEAL Initiative.
HEAL-complaint repositories must be open to data submission from any researcher, regardless of institutional or program affiliation. While these repositories do have program-based submission restrictions in place, they are included here because the aforementioned HEAL-funded programs are required to use them.
Note: As of April 2024, EveAnalytics (formerly known as BioSystics-AP) has been removed from the HEAL-compliant repository list due to new accessibility constraints. If your team has already submitted data to EveAnalytics, please contact us to let us know. If you were considering using EveAnalytics and have not yet deposited data, please reach out and we can help you find a suitable alternative.
Further Information
Descriptive Tags
In the list below, compliant repositories are classified into one or more of the following descriptive tags:
Descriptive Tags | General Rules |
|---|---|
Human Subjects Data | Any data that involves humans as the research subject |
Human Cells | Cells that are derived from humans |
Biospecimens | A biological specimen, or sample of material such as cells or urine, from an organism |
Generalist | Generalist repositories accept data regardless of data type, format, content, or disciplinary focus |
Clinical Trial | Per the National Institutes of Health, a clinical trial is a research study in which one or more human subjects are prospectively assigned to one or more interventions (which may include placebo or other control) to evaluate the effects of those interventions on health-related biomedical or behavioral outcomes. |
Imaging | Imaging data (e.g., MRI, fMRI, PET) and associated clinical data |
Qualitative | Qualitative and multi-method research from social science and related disciplines |
Omics | Specialized databases for genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics or metabolomics datasets and associated clinical data |
Microphysiology | Microphysiology, Electrophysiology data |
Sleep data | Sleep recordings and related data |
Organism-Specific | Data generated from non-human subjects (e.g., mouse, rat, zebrafish) |
Machine Learning | Suitable for hosting machine learning training datasets |
Study Protocol | Appropriate for storing research protocols used or developed by studies |
Code and Software | Code/software generated by studies |
Selection Principles
For further information on the considerations used to generate the above compliant repositories list, please see the HEAL compliant repository principles.