The Open Data Commons for Traumatic Brain Injury: An Interagency Community Platform for Pre-Clinical Data Management...

The Open Data Commons for Traumatic Brain Injury (ODC-TBI.org) was launched in 2018 to support data sharing in pre-clinical TBI. As data science and artificial intelligence continue to advance, open sharing of high-quality, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) data has assumed critical importance to propel discovery science and as a countermeasure to some of the rigor and reproducibility problems plaguing translational research across biomedicine. Researcher-led specialist repositories such as ODC-TBI serve as important hubs through which biomedical communities come together to define data sharing requirements for their respective domains in support of new requirements by funders and journals for routine data sharing. ODC-TBI is now the recognized data repository for pre-clinical TBI research, listed on the National Library of Medicine-recommended repository listing, and is supported by the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke. ODC-TBI forms one of the critical infrastructure components of the PRE Clinical Interagency reSearch resourcE-TBI (PRECISE-TBI) project, an interagency effort to promote and support data sharing, rigor, and reproducibility in pre-clinical TBI research. Through PRECISE-TBI, the ODC-TBI has conducted broad outreach, starting in 2022, resulting in a significant increase in the number of users, datasets uploaded and public data releases. PRECISE-TBI has facilitated the establishment of an Editorial Board providing community oversight of ODC-TBI policies and recommendations, for example, the use of standards such as common data elements (CDEs). Here we describe the current state of the ODC-TBI, including its organization, operation, and governance. We perform a detailed overview of public datasets to provide insight into data sharing practices, including the use of CDEs and ancillary practices such as providing links to publications and citing data. We examine the impact of the ODC-TBI by providing statistics on downloads per datasets and reuse of ODC-TBI data in published studies. The results not only provide insight into the growth trajectory of ODC-TBI and data sharing behaviors in pre-clinical TBI, but also point to areas where increased outreach, communication, and training are needed to firmly establish a culture of data sharing.