Unlocking Innovation: The Generalist Repositories Embrace Transparency and Community on GitHub

4 min readNov 4, 2024

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) is using GitHub to engage the community and openly manage collaborative tasks. This, we hope, will foster greater transparency, enhance innovative community collaboration, and incentivize valuable stakeholder feedback.

The GREI program began in early 2022, and for each year of the program so far, the participating repositories have prepared an agreed-upon coopetition plan that guides collaborative work for the project year. GREI has not previously made this plan or progress towards completing the plan public, but in the spirit of openness that underlies the goals of the GREI program, the GREI repositories agreed to pursue greater transparency and collaboration with the community and allow for innovation. To that end, we have developed a GitHub repository that presents a detailed public view of the Year 3 GREI coopetition plan along with overviews of the Year 1 & 2 coopetition plans, tracks GREI task groups working towards the completion of the Year 3 plan, and provides a venue for community feedback.

Innovation

Using GitHub unlocks the potential for open innovation. The GitHub “Discussion Board” feature provides a space where both GREI team members and stakeholders openly provide progress updates, share ideas, and build upon each other’s contributions, driving scientific progress.

Transparency

Using GitHub fosters greater transparency and accessibility. Sharing the GREI objectives on this widely accessible platform promotes opportunities for community visibility, engagement, and feedback. Through this update, GREI will enhance its ability to drive impactful data-sharing outcomes, facilitating the evolution of open science practices and collaboration.

Image shows a screenshot of the Year 3 Overview issue page in the GREI GitHub repository. — Year 3 Coopetition Plan Overview issue page in the GREI GitHub repository.

The coopetition plans for Years 1–3 of the GREI program have been migrated into GitHub. Browse overviews of Year 1 and Year 2 to see the progress made, and review the current activities for Year 3 to understand the coopetition’s current goals and deliverables.

Community

We encourage community members to actively participate in the innovation process, ensuring that their insights and contributions help shape the future of this project. GREI relies heavily on feedback to understand the community’s needs, highlight priority areas, inform next steps, and achieve its goals. The GREI GitHub Discussion Board includes the FEEDBACK and IDEAS templates to foster community interaction on objectives via guided instructions. As Year 4 fast approaches, we have an excellent opportunity to collect feedback from the community before we initiate tasks and deliverables, which will help GREI better align its goals with community needs. These efforts toward openness and cooperation among the GREI repositories and the wider research community ensure that our progress is not isolated, but shared and built upon.

Graphic displaying the following quote: “I am glad to see the generalist repositories embrace transparency by making their ongoing “coopetition” tasks public via GitHub. I look forward to seeing how the GREI program evolves in response to greater community input to generalist repository product enhancements to better support cultural transformation in data sharing,” attributed to Ishwar Chandramouliswaran, Program Director, Office of Data Science Strategy and Program Officer for GREI.

Help shape GREI priorities in 2025

Each year, the GREI repositories develop a plan outlining tasks and deliverables aligned with the GREI objectives and work to deliver on those goals. We are currently developing our Year 4 plans and seek input from the community. We will hold community calls to discuss the Year 4 draft plan and solicit the community’s input. Look for those calls in late 2024 and early 2025. We’d love to hear from you; help shape GREI priorities in 2025 and beyond by adding comments to the GitHub discussion here.

Authors

Sonia Barbosa, Harvard Dataverse, ORCID, 0000–0002–5477–3522
Matt Carson, Northwestern University, on behalf of Zenodo, 0000–0003–4105–9220
Ishwar Chandramouliswaran, NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, 0000–0001–9697–9599
Lisa Curtin, Figshare, 0000–0003–1137–7789
Derek Jones, NIH Office of Data Science Strategy, 0009–0005–4392–0477
Nici Pfeiffer, OSF, 0000–0001–8335–6018
Ryan Scherle, Dryad, 0000–0002–2184–6094
Lekshmi Sheelakumari, Mendeley Data, 0009–0009–7865–3961
Traci Snowden, Mendeley Data, 0009–0001–3311–7198

About GREI

The Generalist Repository Ecosystem Initiative (GREI) is a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) initiative which has brought seven generalist repositories together into a collaborative working group focused on establishing “a common set of cohesive and consistent capabilities, services, metrics, and social infrastructure” to enhance NIH data sharing and reuse and increasing awareness and adoption of the FAIR principles.

Engage with the GREI Community

Please browse the GREI GitHub space, provide feedback and ideas, and join our community discussions.

To receive updates on GREI activities and events, join the GREI Google Group. All GREI resources including recordings and slides from past events and guides are publicly available in the GREI Community on Zenodo. Check out the GREI Training & Outreach Calendar for information on upcoming training events.