In case you missed it, here are five of the major developments in open data and data sharing for medical and biomedical data in the United States from the past year:

1. July 1st, 2018 – The first requirement of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors’ (ICMJE) data sharing statement policy comes into effect, requiring all manuscripts submitted to ICMJE journals that report results of clinical trials to contain a data sharing statement. Some of the journals effected by this policy change include the New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and PLoS Medicine.

2. September 5th, 2018 – Google launches its Dataset Search tool. While still in beta, this new offering from the search engine giant is sure to grow as more open data repositories align their metadata to be crawled by this new tool

3. October 10th, 2018 – The National Institutes of Health (NIH) issue a Request for Information to receive feedback on a future NIH policy for data management and sharing. The comment period closed on December 10th, 2018. Read the response submitted by the Lamar Soutter Library.  

4. January 1st, 2019 – The second requirement of the ICMJE data sharing statement policy comes into effect, requiring clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after January 1st to include a data sharing plan in the trial’s registration.

5. January 14th, 2019 – President Trump signs the Open, Public, Electronic and Necessary (OPEN) Government Data Act into law, requiring all United States federal agencies to publish all non-sensitive government information, including federally-funded research, as open data. The legislation also details the type of open license that can be attached to the data, mandating that the license must guarantee access to the data “at no cost to the public and with no restrictions on copying, publishing, distributing, transmitting, citing, or adapting”. A summary of the OPEN Government Data Act was produced by the bi-partisan Data Coalition who promoted the bill.  

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