Sarah Ben Maamar
Associate Director for Research Services
Weill Cornell Medicine
Data management and sharing federal regulations (ex. 2023 NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy) are rapidly evolving. This dynamic landscape places pressure on academic institutions to promptly devise suitable and effective responses. Crafting these responses is a multifaceted challenge, necessitating the provision of concise summaries of the new regulatory provisions and tools to facilitate institutional compliance. Weill Cornell Medicine (WCM) has responded proactively to the NIH’s 2023 policy by building upon its pre-existing services and systems. The overarching objective is to establish a comprehensive global ecosystem assisting users in all aspects of data management across the research data lifecycle. WCM’s pre-2022 offerings included the Data Core; a secure computational enclave designed to host and analyze sensitive/restricted data. Additionally, the Data Catalog was in place, enabling researchers to publicly highlight datasets and their associated data usage agreements within the institution. This approach fostered data reuse within the dataset governance constraints. In response to the new NIH policy, WCM has introduced a novel application, the Weill Cornell Medicine Institutional Data Repository for Research (WIDRR). WIDRR streamlines data retention processes for WCM members and is seamlessly integrated into the system responsible for hosting and managing both the Data Core and the WCM Data Catalog. This integration empowers users to create new Data Catalog entries and report their Data Core project data for retention—all within the framework of WIDRR. This is an example of how an academic institution can respond to emerging data management regulations by implementing an integrated approach.
https://datacore.weill.cornell.edu/