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This is outrageous. Spread the word. Are you a US researcher working w foreign institutions? There is something awful brewing: "For foreign subrecipients, the subrecipient to provide copies of all lab notebooks, all data, all documentation that supports the research outcomes as described in the progress report. These supporting materials must be provided to prime recipient with each scientific update (no less than once every six months, or more frequently based on risks). https://rfi.grants.nih.gov/?s=646e6654a8ba09024f09e852
And this is clearly punitive, xenophobic and will dissuade scientific collaboration and make it more difficult. This is unjustified and counterproductive.
@gregggonsalves Not sure what this is saying. If you're a US scientist you have to send your data back to US.
@princelysum @gregggonsalves Regardless of whether this is aimed at US or non-US scientists working abroad, this will affect foreign collaboration by massively reducing the proportion of the grant that gets spent on research - it will significantly increase overhead _only_ for those grants that include foreign collaboration, and collaboration with the US may become illegal in other countries.
@princelysum This is asking for foreign collaborators to send their lab notebooks to their US PIs. Makes no sense.
@gregggonsalves @princelysum I wonder if the Benchling folk advocated for this. Electronic lab notebooks get really compelling when “compliance” is the motivator.
@gregggonsalves Agreed. Counterproductive
#FBPE @gregggonsalves The clue is in the name - "nih.gov" - "Not Invented Here".
I would say this is bad because it is only applied to foreign entities. Unless the datasets are large, this should be standard for all awards.
The PI, regardless of whether the sub-contract is domestic or international, should have access to all documentation and data associated with the award.
This should be a trivial activity if digital notebooks are used--again large datasets may be a problem.
@MCDuncanLab It's being applied selectively. And what are they going to do with all these notebooks anyway. This isn't a policy with a rationale, it's meant as a sop to some in Congress who have targeted certain NIH awards overseas for scrutiny.
I agree the selective thing is a problem. It's a waste of taxpayer money to do any research and not retain usable access to the data.
As for what the PI is going to do with them. Hopefully, both teams would retain access to the digital notebooks. I would hope this would allow them to keep them in archival storage and use the data as needed in the future.
I was able to use data collected by a former postdoc for a recent article nearly 10 years after she collected the data.
It is kind of in line with the new requirement for data storage and management plans for all proposals. Which I think is a good idea, although implemented without enough support.
@MCDuncanLab Right now this is going to make international collaborations more difficult and unattractive.
I see this as only an extension of the increased emphasis on better data hygiene. I think all PIs should have access to and routinely review all notebooks about the research they are directing.
If asking people to do what they should be doing already is going to make it too difficult and unattractive to do an international collaboration, I'd be wary of the collaboration.
Even if it's a big datasest, the PI needs to have unlimited access to a copy of the raw data.
What is the scope of the research covered by this?
For a lot research this will simply be in conflict with many countries data protection laws and totally unworkable.
@RichardShaw Any NIH subawards to non-US institutions
