The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is striving to ensure scientists who produce and openly share valuable datasets get proper credit for their work. To support this goal, the agency developed a new metric called the Data Sharing Index (S-index). It measuers how researchers make their data discoverable, accessible and usable.
To support the new metric, NIH launched the S-index Challenge — a competition offering $1 million in prizes to encourage participants to create and test methods for evaluating the impact of data-sharing efforts. The initiative places strong emphasis on FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and on demonstrating tangible benefits for research outcomes.
I.AIM researchers (in bold) were among the winning teams
FIRST PLACE ($400,000)
Project: A simple and field-aware S-index for promoting and rewarding data sharing in which the team developed Scholar Data (scholardata.io), a platform inspired by Google Scholar that measures the scientific impact of shared datasets.
Lead: Bhavesh Patel, PhD (California Medical Innovations Institute)
Team: Aaron Lee, MD and Cecilia Lee, MD, (Washington University St. Louis), Sanjay Soundarajan, PhD, James O'Neill, PhD, and Aydan Gasimova, PhD (California Medical Innovations Institute)
SECOND PLACE ($300,000)
Project: The SHARE Index: a unified metric for recognizing exemplary data sharing behavior (ShareScore.org
Lead: Shuhan He, MD (ConductScience)
Team: Yijian Henry He, PhD, Lawrence Jiang, Bifei Hao, Boyu Peng and Santosh Adhikari (ConductScience), Allison Goff, PhD, Shivani Pimparkar and Pedram Safari, PhD (MGH Institute of Health Professions), Joshua Goldstein, MD, PhD (Harvard Medical School), Andrew Marshall, MD (Google), David Liebovitz, MD, co-director of the I.AIM Center for Medical Education in Digital Healthcare and Data Science