Guided by the belief that all lives have equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help people who are most in need lead healthy, productive lives. The foundation supports this mission by harnessing advances in science and technology to reduce health inequities and save lives in poor countries.
Goal
In accordance with its charitable mission, the foundation is committed to optimizing the use of health-related data to translate knowledge into life-saving interventions. To this end, it is essential that data are made widely and rapidly available to the broader global health community through good data access practices.
Data access is intended to promote:
- Innovation, by encouraging diversity of analysis and opinion, facilitating evaluation of alternative hypotheses, permitting meta-analysis, and facilitating synthesis of results from individual projects into a larger whole, thereby promoting potentially lifesaving new insights.
- Collaboration, between teams and institutions, and among diverse disciplines, resulting in greater productivity and creativity.
- Efficiency, by preventing unnecessary duplication of effort, enabling secondary analyses of existing data, and enabling the redirection of resources to the most promising research endeavors, thereby maximizing the potential impact of investments.
- Accountability, by encouraging independent verification and analysis, thereby improving data quality.
- Capacity Strengthening, by facilitating the education of new researchers and evaluators and enabling broader access to data for secondary analysis, which is of particular importance to investigators in developing countries.
Scope
These principles apply to data generated from activities sponsored in whole or in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where data refers to final, annotated quantitative and qualitative datasets and accompanying information such as metadata, codebooks, data dictionaries, and questionnaires. Data may arise as a primary output of a grant, or as a product of other activities, such as program evaluations.
Requirements
As a condition of a grant award from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and in support of the foundation’s Global Access policy, all prospective grantees will be required to facilitate the prompt and broad dissemination of data. For grants over $500,000, this will begin with development of a Data Access Plan to specify how data will be managed and accessed. Any anticipated costs of making data widely available may be included in new grant budgets and will be subject to review and approval. Prospective grantees are encouraged to consult with their Program Officer in developing a suitable Data Access Plan.
Additional Reference Documents
For additional information on the Global Health Data Access Initiative, please refer to the Guiding Principles and Frequently Asked Questions documents.