As we celebrate 25 years of the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR), we have asked the former Directors to reflect on their time at the OBSSR. This guest blog was authored by OBSSR’s second Director, Raynard Kington, M.D., Ph.D., M.B.A.

This year marks OBSSR’s 25th anniversary and also the first year that we will conduct the Matilda White Riley Honors virtually due to the social distancing necessities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

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.

“You tell me what you need people to do, and I’ll tell you how to help them do it.” Although a simplification, this statement by social and behavioral scientists to our infectious disease colleagues illustrates the nature of our collaboration during an infectious disease outbreak like the current COVID-19 outbreak. Without this collaboration, we risk that people will not do what we are telling them to do.

As we celebrate 25 years of the OBSSR, we have asked the former Directors to reflect on their time at the OBSSR. This guest blog was authored by OBSSR’s first Director, Norman B. Anderson, Ph.D.

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 to large grants or to genomic studies; they are applicable to data sharing of nearly all of the research that the NIH supports. Therefore, after considering initial input from the scientific community, the NIH this week released its Draft NIH Policy for Data Management and Sharing that is intended to encourage data sharing of all NIH-supported research.

The National Institutes of Health has awarded $945 million in total fiscal year 2019 funding for grants, contracts, and cooperative agreements across 41 states through the Helping to End Addiction Long-term Initiative or NIH HEAL Initiative. The NIH-wide research effort aims to improve treatments for chronic pain, curb the rates of opioid use disorder (OUD) and overdose and achieve long-term recovery from opioid addiction.