FAQ

What are benefits of data sharing?

  • Funders are increasingly mandating data sharing. The Gates Foundation, Wellcome Trust and many others are requiring that Individual Patient-Level Data from research they fund is shared. In addition, the updated NIH Data Sharing Policy went into effect January 2023. For many funders, data sharing costs are an allowable research expense and maybe built into future grant proposals and billed to current grants.
  • Top journals such as the NEJM, BMJ, Lancet and other ICMJE journals require that the data sharing statement is made at the time of trial registration. Journals are publishing the data sharing statement at the time of publication.
  • Moral obligations (owe it to trial participants). We owe it to participants of clinical trials who have volunteered to take part in this research for their data to be leveraged to maximize scientific knowledge. Surveys show that most participants want their data to be shared if adequate safeguards are in place.
  • Increase citations. Sharing detailed clinical research data is associated with increased citation rate.

What is the Vivli platform and how is it unique?

Vivli is an independent non-profit organization launched in 2016. Vivli evolved from a project of The Multi-Regional Clinical Trials Center of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard (MRCT Center) to enhance access to clinical trials data by promoting data sharing and transparency. In 2013, the MRCT Center and a diverse group of global stakeholders embarked on a mission to define, design, and launch an innovative platform solution for global clinical trial data sharing.

Vivli’s mission is to promote, coordinate, and facilitate clinical research data sharing through the creation and implementation of a sustainable global data-sharing enterprise. Vivli serves to meet the needs of researchers in all parts of the clinical research ecosystem. For those requesting data, Vivli provides managed access to data from completed clinical trials around the globe and facilitates the ability to integrate data from existing platforms and data repositories. For those seeking to contribute data, Vivli provides a secure, flexible, and user-friendly platform to facilitate sharing clinical trial data with the research community.

The Vivli platform provides access to anonymized individual participant-level data (IPD) or the raw data that is collected during a clinical trial. The clinical trials represented in Vivli are global and contributed by a diverse group of data contributors. By serving as a global trusted platform, Vivli increases the discoverability of available data in the wider research ecosystem, and increases the overall capacity worldwide for effective data sharing, aggregation, re-use, and novel analysis of valuable clinical research data to advance science and improve public health. The Vivli platform is a cloud-based platform that consists of a dynamic search engine, a data repository, and a secure research environment.

For more information about Vivli and the Vivli platform, please visit our About page.