NIH DRKB Webinar: Incentivizing Data Sharing through Scholar Data, an S-index Solution - Events

📝 Event Description

The NIH Biomedical Data Repositories and Knowledgebases Program (DRKB) will host a webinar on "Incentivizing data sharing through Scholar Data, an S-index solution."

Despite growing mandates, data sharing is still not common practice in scientific research. A major reason is the lack of incentives: researchers who share datasets receive little formal credit for their effort. Recognizing this gap, the NIH launched the Data Sharing Index (S-index) Challenge in 2024, a $1 million prize competition to develop a standardized metric, inspired by the h-index, that recognizes and rewards researchers for high-quality data sharing.

This webinar will present the outcomes of the first-place winning team led by Bhavesh. It will introduce a vision of the S-index as a metric that quantifies a researcher's data-sharing impact by combining three dataset-level signals: FAIRness, citations, and alternative mentions in software, policy documents, patents, and other non-traditional outputs.

To put this vision into practice, the team built Scholar Data, an open-source, Google Scholar-like platform where researchers can track their datasets and their data-sharing impact. The session will include a live demonstration of Scholar Data, a brief overview of how the underlying S-index was validated across millions of real datasets, and a discussion of how funders, repositories, and researchers can use Scholar Data to make data sharing a recognized and integral part of the research process.

Registration is available here.

💡 Our Role / Contribution

Bhavesh Patel will deliver the webinar.

📍 Location

Virtual (online webinar)

🗓 Date and Time

Friday, November 6, 2026 · 1:00 – 2:00 PM ET