DataWorks! Prize

DataWorks! Prize

Supports teams sharing biomedical data broadly through recognition and competitive performance awards.

The DataWorks! Prize is an annual cash-prize challenge co-sponsored by the NIH Office of Data Science Strategy and the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB). It recognizes biomedical research teams that demonstrate exemplary data sharing and reuse practices — not research results per se, but the practices underlying open, reproducible science. The challenge has completed three consecutive cycles: 2022 (11 monetary team awards, administered by FASEB), 2023 (7 monetary team awards), and 2024 (13 monetary team awards), with winning teams presenting at an NIH symposium. The 2025 cycle had not been formally announced as of mid-2026.

The DataWorks! Prize operates as a prize challenge, not a Notice of Funding Opportunity. There is no formal application to a grant program; instead, teams submit entries demonstrating their data sharing and reuse work for review by an NIH/FASEB judge panel. Winners receive cash awards (individual prize amounts are not published) and present their work at an NIH-hosted symposium, providing visibility and recognition beyond the cash component. Eligibility is broad — higher education institutions, nonprofits, for-profit entities, research organizations, and individual investigators can all participate; there are no published geographic restrictions.

Teams competing for the DataWorks! Prize should document a concrete, completed or ongoing biomedical research project in which data sharing and reuse practices were central — not incidental — to the research design. Prior winners have included teams from academic medical centers, universities, and multi-institutional consortia that made datasets openly available, built reuse pipelines, or demonstrated measurable downstream citation and reuse of their shared data. Submissions are evaluated on the quality and impact of data sharing practices, not the scientific novelty of the underlying research. The annual submission window is announced at datascience.nih.gov/dataworks.