FABBS Supports Efforts to Advance Open Science

As the federal government and scientific societies work to increase the openness of science, FABBS is supporting a NASEM study on behavioral ontology, providing information on federal requirements and successful examples of sharing, and informing federal policies and practices.

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) has announced the committee members of the Accelerating Behavioral Science Through Ontology Development and Use, of which FABBS is one of the sponsoring organizations. NASEM defines ontologies as formal classification systems and/or knowledge structures that identity science concepts with accepted labels and meanings. The objective of the study is for ontologies to allow information to be effectively created, organized, reused, integrated, and analyzed. To that end, the study will determine the parameters of ontology development for behavioral science research (BSR), review the state of development and use of behavioral ontology in BSR, and define convincing use cases as well as methods, limitations and barriers that need to be addressed in order to facilitate widespread ontology of use in BSR. The Committee will hold an open meeting on Monday, March 1.

FABBS is honored to join six of our sister scientific organizations, led by the American Geophysical Union, to sponsor the Data Sharing Seminar Series for Societies. The second webinar in the series, ‘Open Science Incentives for Researchers: The Role of Societies and Organizations’ will be held on Friday, March 5 at 10:00 am ET. FABBS Executive Director, Juliane Baron chaired the first webinar, ‘Data Sharing and Citation: How Societies Can Make a Difference’ with Helena Cousijn, DataCite and Shelley Stall, AGU. A recording is available here.

This past fall FABBS hosted the Data Standards for Behavioral and Brain Sciences Webinar Series on how to help the efforts of our FABBS members to fulfill data management and sharing standards and think about the long-term potential for data interoperability opportunities.

FABBS is currently working on a response to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Request for Information on Common Data Elements (CDE) due on May 10th, 2021. This is an important opportunity for our scientific disciplines to provide feedback on the use and challenges of CDE. NIH is especially interested in how COVID-19 studies use CDEs and how this method makes research on coronavirus more available.

Recognizing the intention of CDEs to allow for interoperability, interconnection, harmonization, standardization and sharing of data when and where appropriate, FABBS is also aware of challenges in adopting CDEs.  FABBS members with experience with CDEs should consider responding and are invited to provide input to jbaron@fabbs.org.

FABBS, NASEM, Open Science