| October 5, 2022
D. Craig Hopp, Ph.D.
Emmeline Edwards, Ph.D. If you intend to submit a National Institutes of Health (NIH) application next year, you should know there are big changes coming. Its been on the horizon for several years, but the new NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) Policy will go into effect starting with applications received on or after January 25, 2023. Responsible data management and sharing has many benefits, including accelerating the pace of biomedical research, enabling validation of research results, and providing accessibility to high-value datasets. You may be asking yourself what this means for you as an applicant. Depending on your prior experience with DMS, the change may be subtle to dramatic. You will now be required to include a brief plan (about two pages) that addresses six separate elements. Those include the type of data to be shared; any tools, software, or code needed to access or manipulate the data; standards that will be applied to the data and associated metadata; plans for data preservation and access; applicable factors impacting access to or reuse of the data; and how compliance with the new policy requirements will be monitored and managed over time. NIH has launched a new website to help investigators understand the requirements of this new policy. | 
