The NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI): Supporting Data Sharing in Generalist Repositories

This presentation was given as part of the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) National Center for Data Services (NCDS) summer 2024 webinar series on Topics in Data Sharing, on August 7, 2024.

Generalist repositories are a flexible, trusted resource for sharing research data for which there is no appropriate discipline specific repository as well as many other research outputs valuable for reproducibility and open science. This webinar was presented by participants of the Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) (Dataverse, Dryad, Figshare, Mendeley Data, Open Science Framework, Vivli, and Zenodo), an NIH program supporting the enhancement of generalist repository functionality to better support NIH data sharing use cases. The GREI repositories shared generalist repository use cases and best practices for sharing and finding data, and described how generalist repositories fit into the wider data repository landscape and how they can be part of meeting the new NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy requirements. It presented both the key common features of the GREI generalist repositories that meet the NIH desirable repository characteristics as well as the unique features of these repositories that make them suited to specific types of data. 

Learning objectives

• Define generalist repositories and how they fit into the broader data repository landscape.

• Explain the purpose and goals of the NIH Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI).

• Describe common use cases for generalist repositories in data sharing.

• Understand best practices for sharing and finding data in generalist repositories.

• Discuss how generalist repositories can help meet NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy requirements.