Over the past 60 years, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) successfully coordinated the research needs for over 800 universities and research institutes. This work led to the expanded use of secondary data, the development of innovative lines of research, and the training of multiple generations of scholars across the fields of social and behavioral sciences. The role of the social sciences in understanding major health challenges and disasters expanded rapidly over the past several decades, and ICPSR, in partnership with the Institute for Social Research (ISR), played a key role in offering infrastructure to support this work.

New areas and directions emerged, such as population health, social determinants of health, health equity, the growth of longitudinal studies, and complex national population-based surveys. ICPSR was able to bring together and share cutting-edge research emerging from cross-disciplinary collaborations in a systematic manner, using an open science model of information distribution.

An ICPSR-led consortium model for social, behavioral, and economic (SBE) research provided a nexus for communication, streamlining information-sharing across the behavioral and social science community, multiple NIH Centers, and to the public. This project created a new independent Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research on COVID-19 Consortium Coordinating Center (SBECCC) for COVID-19-related research. The new SBECCC included resources and support for research specific to COVID-19.