How time flies! The OBSSR released its third strategic plan in September 2017, and we are already halfway through this 5-year plan. The OBSSR has organized its functions and activities to achieve the objectives of this strategic plan and has made significant progress on these objectives. Internally, the OBSSR is performing a mid-course evaluation to assess what has been accomplished and what remains to be accomplished under the current strategic plan, but in parallel we have also begun planning for the next strategic plan, and we want your input.

This year, 2020, marks the 25th anniversary of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) at the National Institutes of Health. OBSSR was enacted by Congress in 1993 and established two years later in July, 1995.

The fourth NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival was held on December 6, 2019. The festival serves two purposes, to highlight some of the recent behavioral and social science supported by the NIH, and to bring together behavioral and social science program officers, review administrators, and intramural scientists across the NIH to network face-to-face.

Over the years, NIH has released policies to encourage data sharing. Our first data sharing policy in 2003 was limited to awards requesting more than $500,000 in direct costs in any year. Subsequent data sharing policies focused predominantly on genomic data sharing (Genome-Wide Association Studies Policy; Genomic Data Sharing Policy). There are clear and well-accepted advantages of data sharing including increasing sample size, facilitating reproducibility analyses, and increasing the impact of the taxpayer’s investment in data collection to advance science. These advantages are not limited t…