Superfund Research Program

The FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data Management and Stewardship guide data sharing practices. The new SRP supplements emphasize interoperability and reusability. Interoperability is the creation of datasets with a similar format, language, and vocabulary. Reusability is the ability to replicate data.

The Superfund Research Program (SRP) awarded administrative supplements to its Multiproject Center (P42) and Individual Research (R01) grantees to expand data integration, interoperability, and reuse. The SRP encourages data sharing among its grantees to accelerate new discoveries, stimulate new collaborations, and increase scientific transparency and rigor.

Researchers at SRP Centers study across a variety of disciplines and produce large amounts of data on biological responses, exposures, and environmental technologies. As such, data generated from these Centers are diverse and include multi-omics and imaging to geoscience and exposure distribution data. The supplements aim to integrate data across these biomedical and environmental science and engineering fields, one of the biggest challenges in SRP data sharing. The supplements will also help each Center improve data management by making previously and newly produced datasets more accessible, interoperable, and reusable to SRP researchers.

Use Cases are at the core of these supplements, wherein awardees have combined at least two distinct datasets to help address a real-world, science-driven research question. The Use Case advances the research goals of each of the collaborators while also facilitating the interoperability and reuse of SRP data.

Each Use Case team will also take part in regular discussions with other teams to leverage best practices and recommendations to reach their goals. These best practices for data interoperability and reuse of SRP datasets will be shared at an in-person meeting at the end of the supplement and with the broader environmental science community.

By encouraging data reuse to accelerate the pace of research, these supplemental grants further the SRP's goal of breaking the link between chemical exposure and disease. The funding also addresses the second theme of the NIEHS's Strategic Plan: promoting research translation by using data to enhance knowledge and inspire action.