OSTP: Changes needed to better share COVID data

FCW

July 8, 2020

At the request of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, CSET coordinated the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset. The project is the result of a collaboration between CSET, the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Microsoft, the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

Data sharing has been a crucial part of the global fight against the COVID-19 virus, but there are some hurdles that can slow the process down at federal agencies that collect that a lot of that data, according to one of the White House’s top tech experts.

In March, Dr. Lynne Parker said, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy began appealing to scientists and researchers from industry and academia to help open up their data for use by others, as well as help them deal with the deluge of research papers being generated. OSTP worked with several organizations, including the National Institutes of Health and Georgetown University, to release the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset (CORD-19) — a collection of 35,000 scholarly papers on COVID-19 and other coronaviruses. The data deluge that spurred the dataset’s creation continues, she said, with 2,200 papers submitted in the last week.

Read the full article at FCW.