The National Cancer Institute Cancer Moonshot Public Access and Data Sharing Policy—Initial assessment and implications

Since 2013, federal research-funding agencies have been required to develop and implement broad data sharing policies. Yet agencies today continue to grapple with the mechanisms necessary to enable the sharing of a wide range of data types, from genomic and other -omics data to clinical and pharmacological data to survey and qualitative data. In 2016, the National Cancer Institute (NCI) launched the ambitious $1.8 billion Cancer Moonshot Program, which included a new Public Access and Data Sharing (PADS) Policy applicable to funding applications submitted on or after October 1, 2017. The PADS Policy encourages the immediate public release of published research results and data and requires all Cancer Moonshot grant applicants to submit a PADS plan describing how they will meet these goals. We reviewed the PADS plans submitted with approximately half of all funded Cancer Moonshot grant applications in fiscal year 2018, and found that a majority did not address one or more elements required by the PADS Policy. Many such plans made no reference to the PADS Policy at all, and several referenced obsolete or outdated National Institutes of Health (NIH) policies instead. We believe that these omissions arose from a combination of insufficient education and outreach by NCI concerning its PADS Policy, both to potential grant applicants and among NCI’s program staff and external grant reviewers. We recommend that other research funding agencies heed these findings as they develop and roll out new data sharing policies.