NIH accepts plan to make national library 'epicenter for biomedical data science'

The National Library of Medicine could become the epicenter for biomedical data science and dramatically expand its activities beyond that of its parent organization, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), according to an advisory committee report to the NIH director.

The committee made the following recommendations:

• Continually evolve to remain a leader in assimilating and disseminating biomedical research findings to the public, healthcare professionals and researchers worldwide
• Lead efforts to support and catalyze open science, data sharing and research reproducibility, promoting the idea of biomedical information as public good
• Be the intellectual and programmatic epicenter for data science at NIH
• Strengthen its role in fostering the future generation of professionals in biomedical informatics, data science, library sciences and related disciplines through sustained and focused training efforts
• Ensure this nation's legacy in biomedical research is both safe and accessible for long-term use

As the "epicenter for data science," the library should "promulgate" various internal and external efforts such as helping to nurture a talent pool in the science and engineering of EHRs, the analysis of biomedical text and the integration of diverse and multimodal datasets.

NIH Director Francis Collins MD, PhD, approved the report and plans to work with Congress on implementing the infrastructure to achieve this vision, according to an announcement. “The pace of change in biomedical data science is moving at lightning speed with the increasing use of big data and the melding of many diverse data types,” he said. “It is critical that NIH pave the path forward for data science, and this move will enable researchers, medical practitioners and many others to use the wealth of vast knowledge and data available to them through the NLM.”

Read the report.