NIH collects demographic information including sex, ethnicity, race, and disability status from researchers as part of their eRA personal profile. The data collected are confidential and used for aggregate statistical reporting only, not for consideration of funding of individual grant applications.
NIH has long been committed to transparency into who and what we fund. We have previously discussed the value of freely-available web tools that allow you to gain insight into NIH funding decisions. Award data available via RePORT and RePORTER, for instance, include non-sensitive information such as awardee institution, principal investigator, funding levels, research abstracts, as well as associated publications, patents, and other project outcomes. The data available through RePORT are quite powerful in their own right. However, compelling arguments exist for why researchers outside NIH should have access to even more information associated with the grants process.
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