NIH BISTI Seminar: Incentivizing Data Sharing through Scholar Data, an S-index Solution
📝 Event Description
The NIH Biomedical Information Science and Technology Initiative (BISTI) seminar series will feature a talk on "Incentivizing data sharing through Scholar Data, an S-index solution." BISTI seminars reach roughly 200 NIH staff with interests in data science and data sharing.
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 seminar will present the outcomes of the first-place winning team led by Bhavesh Patel. 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 seminar will include a live demonstration of Scholar Data, a brief overview of how the underlying metric 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.
💡 Our Role / Contribution
Bhavesh Patel will deliver a 40-minute seminar followed by 20 minutes of Q&A. Following the seminar, he will join small breakout sessions with BISTI subgroups for a further couple of hours of in-depth discussion and questions.
📍 Location
Virtual (online seminar)
🗓 Date and Time
Thursday, September 3, 2026 · 9:00 AM ET / 6:00 AM PT
Seminar and Q&A: 9:00 – 10:00 AM ET
Breakout discussions to follow