The NIH has mandated that starting in 2023 all grants that it funds must include a plan for data sharing. A serious lingering question is whether there is actua

The NIH has mandated that starting in 2023 all grants that it funds must include a plan for data sharing. A serious lingering question is whether there is actually going to be any enforcement, given that it is already a monumental challenge for investigators to even account for the data that has been submitted/shared/archived by their lab, forget some 3rd party trying to do it. The tools for doing this across a whole diverse ecosystem are shall we say not user friendly (if they exist at all), and that is being charitable (and I say this as someone who has written some of those less than user friendly tools). Most of the systems, archives, etc. are not interoperable, they don't share common APIs, much less have some common interface that would allow someone to track all their published data, forget integrate it. Program officers are going to be desperate for ways to account for this stuff, but I worry that at least initially they are not going to have the leverage needed to get researchers to engage in even the most basic data management practices which would allow them to start solving the problem down the line. How many files did you upload to archive X? Which project were they for? How many datasets are you expecting to produce for this grant? You have published 10 papers associated with this grant number, where are the datasets that correspond to those papers? Some investigators can answer these immediately and easily, others will throw a screaming fit that they were even asked for such a thing.