CAFÉ: A Joint BUSPH-HSPH Research Coordinating Center of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative Leveraging Harvard Dataverse Repository

Climate change health (CCH) research is currently hampered by 
(1) a fractured community of practice (COP) that is frequently siloed by discipline and concentrated in well-resourced institutions and countries;
(2) innovative data assets that exist but are often hard to find, inconsistently documented, and challenging to manage and link to other data resources;
(3) lack of access, especially by early-stage investigators, to necessary data and computing environments; and
(4) lack of a centralized platform to support the domestic and global capacity-building initiatives needed to expand the COP.

To address these challenges we recently launched the BUSPH-HSPH-CAFÉ (the CAFÉ), the joint BUSPH-HSPH Research Coordinating Center (RCC) of the NIH Climate Change and Health Initiative that leverages the state-of-the-art CCH research, education, and policy translation ecosystem of Boston University School of Public Health and Harvard University. The CAFÉ includes a data management function, which is establishing a centralized framework for disseminating data, with complete and standardized metadata and documentation in compliance with the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) principles for data sharing. Our approach leverages the Harvard Dataverse Repository, an established and rapidly growing NIH-supported and -funded research data repository (project number 1OT2DB000004-01), in conjunction with GitHub and other state-of-the-art tools.