Building Sustainable Software Tools for Open Science (R03 Clinical Trial Not Allowed)
Funding Agency:
- National Institutes of Health
The goal of this NOFO is to enhance the sustainability and impact of research software tools, in accordance with the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. The program will support efforts that address robustness, sustainability, reusability, portability, and scalability of existing biomedical, clinical, behavioral, social, and health-related research software tools and workflows of recognized scientific value. It is primarily intended to provide support for research software development, with some allowance for other costs that may be required to improve tools with significant user base or demonstrate potential for community adoption. Collaborations either within or across institutions are desirable and may include industry or academic partners.
Delivering reliable, sustainable, and reusable software across multiple platforms requires a whole lifecycle approach, as illustrated with a few instances. Software development can be improved by enhancing the development process, including the addition of resources for building, testing, and managing change in an open-source community. Robustness and reliability can be improved through open-source licensing to increase community engagement for (re)usage, testing, and validation. Reusability can be enhanced by improving dissemination channels for important algorithms and tools, by publication of tools in shared container registries, and with well-crafted operating manuals. Interoperability can be enhanced by incorporating open interfaces and data formats, especially through engagement in relevant communities and standards efforts. Refactoring can enhance portability and take advantage of new hardware or compute environments).
Examples that address one or more challenges toward building robust software suitable for open science and modern computing include, but are not limited to:
- Adding application programming interfaces (APIs) and services to software, especially when compliant to community standards;
- Refactoring of software to incorporate standard interfaces and data formats, replace custom code with standard, hardened libraries;
- Refactoring software for portability and to scale efficiently on cloud or hybrid environments;
- Reducing coupling and complex shared state, allowing code to operate on diverse data sources and in collaboration with other services;
- Adopting standard input and output data formats including providing clean and well-documented input, output, and configuration that make scope software components more usable in composition via workflow languages and ensure that data exchanged by services maximizes the use of open data formats;
- Implementing standard logging models, improving performance through improved logging, monitoring, code profiling and optimization, taking advantage of parallelization, or use of graphics processing units (GPUs);
- Enhancing source code, documentation, version management and build/test tools to support community open-source development;
- Developing standard build and packaging tools to manage dependencies and produce containerized runtimes;
- Formatting packages for sharing via common package management tools appropriate to the language and environment;
- Enhancing standard unit and functional testing support and sample data sets for testing patches and upgrades;
This funding opportunity is meant to support development of robust, re-usable scientific software and tools. Data generation and data analysis projects are NOT in scope of this NOFO.
The combined budget for direct costs for the two-year project period may not exceed $300,000. No more than $200,000 direct costs may be requested in any single year.
December 04, 2024; June 4, 2025, December 04, 2025
Ishwar Chandramouliswaran
Office of Data Science Strategy
Email: sustainablesoftware@mail.nih.gov
Noffisat Oki, PhD
NIDCR - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DENTAL & CRANIOFACIAL RESEARCH
Phone: 301-402-6778
E-mail: noffisat.oki@nih.gov
Qi Duan
NIBIB - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF BIOMEDICAL IMAGING AND BIOENGINEERING
Phone: 301-827-4674
E-mail: qi.duan@nih.gov
Lori A.J. Scott-Sheldon, Ph.D.
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Phone: 301-792-2309
Email: lori.scott-sheldon@nih.gov
Xujing Wang, Ph.D
NIDDK - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF DIABETES AND DIGESTIVE AND KIDNEY DISEASES
Phone: 301-451-2862
E-mail: xujing.wang@nih.gov
James Gao
NEI - NATIONAL EYE INSTITUTE
Phone: 301.594.6074
E-mail: james.gao@nih.gov
Christopher Gentry Duncan, PhD
NIEHS - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH SCIENCES
Phone: 984-287-3256
E-mail: duncancg@niehs.nih.gov
Roger Miller, PhD
NIDCD - NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DEAFNESS AND OTHER COMMUNICATION DISORDERS
Phone: 301.402.3458
E-mail: roger.miller@nih.gov
Utibe Ronald Bickhamwright, PhD
NIMHD - NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON MINORITY HEALTH AND HEALTH DISPARITIES
Phone: 301-402-1366
E-mail: utibe.bickham-wright@nih.gov
Emrin Horgusluoglu, Ph.D.
National Center for Complementary & Integrative Health (NCCIH)
Phone: 240-383-5302
Email: emrin.horgusluoglu-moloch@nih.gov
Olga Brazhnik, PhD
NHLBI - NATIONAL HEART, LUNG, AND BLOOD INSTITUTE
Phone: 301-435-0758
E-mail: brazhnik@mail.nih.gov
Alison Yao, Ph.D.
NIA - NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON AGING
Phone: 301-827-7264
E-mail: yaoal@nia.nih.gov
David J. Miller, Ph.D.
National Cancer Institute (NCI)
Telephone: 240-276-6810
Email: david.miller3@nih.gov
Raj Srinath, PhD
NIAMS - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF ARTHRITIS AND MUSCULOSKELETAL AND SKIN DISEASES
Phone: 301-827-6943
E-mail: raj.srinath@nih.gov
Meryl Sufian, PhD
National Library of Medicine (NIH)
Phone: 301-496-4671
Email: Meryl.Sufian@nih.gov
Susan Nicole Wright
NIDA - NATIONAL INSTITUTE ON DRUG ABUSE
Phone: 301-402-6683
E-mail: susan.wright@nih.gov
Susan Jekielek, PhD
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)
Telephone: 301-402-5795
Email: susan.jekielek@nih.gov
Jean Gao, Ph.D.
NHGRI – NATIONAL HUMAN GENOME RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Phone: 301-480-2247
Email: jean.gao@nih.gov
Elizabeth Powell, Ph.D.
National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA)
Telephone: 301-443-0786
Email: elizabeth.powell3@nih.gov
Clayton Scott Bingham, Ph.D.
NINDS - NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF NEUROLOGICAL DISORDERS AND STROKE
Phone: 301-402-7122
E-mail: clayton.bingham@nih.gov