Significance statement

Lifecycle-aware evaluation of biomedical data ecosystems

NoteSignificance statement

Public biomedical data ecosystems are now core scientific infrastructure, but each funded program tracks its own metrics differently, so portfolio-level comparison is effectively impossible. We argue that three product-strategy frameworks — public value, scientific quality, operations and finance — map onto research data resources, that their weight shifts predictably across a resource’s lifecycle, and that ignoring this shift misallocates funding. The NIH Common Fund Data Ecosystem operationalizes the model across 19 programs in real time.