The COVID Information Commons (CIC) is an open website to facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration across various COVID research efforts, funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator and the NSF Technology, Innovation and Partnerships Directorate. The CIC serves as an open resource for researchers, students, and decision-makers from academia, government, not-for-profits and industry to identify collaboration opportunities, to leverage each other's research findings, and to accelerate the most promising research to mitigate the broad societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CIC was developed as a collaborative proposal led by the Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, hosted by Columbia University, in collaboration with the Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub, South Big Data Innovation Hub, and West Big Data Innovation Hub. It was funded by the NSF Convergence Accelerator (NSF #2028999) in May 2020 and launched in July 2020. The initial focus of the CIC website was on the 723 NSF-funded COVID Rapid Response Research (RAPID) projects funded in 2020. The CIC-E: COVID Information Commons Extension for Pandemic Recovery project was proposed and funded in 2021 (NSF #2139391) by the CIC project team with the goal to increase researcher collaboration across NSF and NIH awardees and with global collaborators, as we continue to combat the novel coronavirus, and glean learnings for future uses of innovations developed for COVID response and recovery, including potential insights which can be leveraged for future pandemics.
The CIC extension launched on June 30, 2022 increasing the corpus of awards from just NSF to include NIH-funded COVID related awards, both present and past, through all funding vehicles, in pertinent areas of COVID research, response and recovery. The CIC-extension provides more opportunity for multi-agency and multidisciplinary research collaboration as all the Principal Investigators (PIs) for awards in the CIC will be invited to present their research and collaborate on the monthly CIC Research Lighting Talk Webinars and Collaboration Sessions, the annual CIC community workshop, and working groups to be created with researcher input. Through the CIC-Extension award (NSF #2139391), the CIC includes the following information and search tools:
- COVID Awards & Researcher Database includes over 13,300 records of COVID-related NSF and NIH awards, as of August 2024 with award and researcher information.
- Faceted search of thousands of awards from NSF and NIH including by:
- Funder - NSF and/or NIH
- NSF Directorate
- NIH Institutes and Centers
- Awardee organization
- State/US Territory
- Principal Investigator Name
- Program Officer/Official
- Award start and end dates
- Open keyword search
- Faceted search of thousands of awards from NSF and NIH including by:
- COVID Research Explorer ML Maps, a machine-learning powered tool which clusters the awards by multiple parameters and keywords, including topical areas, PI details, award amount, institutional location, abstract, and other publicly available information. This is initially available for NSF COVID RAPID awards, and will be extended to all the CIC awards from NSF and NIH.
- COVID-19 Research Funding Opportunities
- COVID-19 Datasets
- COVID-19 Groups and Guides
- COVID-19 Events, including monthly CIC COVID-19 Research Lightning Talks
- Student research opportunities, including the annual CIC Student Paper Challenge
- Increased accessibility features for the CIC, including English transcriptions and Spanish translations of past COVID-19 Research Lightning Talks and webinars.
- CIC Video Library
- PI Profiles of information provided by the COVID award PIs in the CIC Corpus
The CIC will continue to grow and evolve in ways pertinent to the CIC community, including:
- Development and execution of annual CIC Student Paper Challenges
- Creation of new CIC Research Working Groups
- Development and execution of an Annual CIC Community Workshop
- Automated CIC PI survey input to provide additional metadata in PI profiles
- Additional search for co-PIs of the grants in the CIC
- Development and delivery of new metadata and data search and discovery mechanisms
- Ongoing metadata curation
If you have any input or questions related to the CIC, please send an email to [email protected].
Visit our Events page to keep updated with COVID-related virtual events.
The Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub (NEBDHub) is committed to providing a supportive and welcoming environment to everyone who works, studies and interacts with the NEBDHub Community at public events.
Please refer to the NEBDHub Code of Conduct for information about the Hub’s community guidelines, including options for reporting Code of Conduct violations.
Email [email protected] with any questions.