The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is seeking applications for its Building Sustainable Software Tools for Open Science.
Donor Name: National Institutes of Health (NIH)
State: All States
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Grant
Deadline: 12/04/2026
Size of the Grant: More than $1 million
Grant Duration: 2 Years
Details:
The purpose of this notice of funding opportunity (NOFO) is to enhance the sustainability and impact of research software tools by enabling the use of best practices and design principles in software development and by leveraging continuing advances in computing. This NOFO is also expected to facilitate the creation of vibrant partnerships between developers and users of software and tools, and to promote FAIR practices for research software to maximize research value.
The goal of this NOFO is to enhance the sustainability and impact of research software tools, in accordance with the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science. The program will support efforts that address robustness, sustainability, reusability, portability, and scalability of existing biomedical, clinical, behavioral, social, and health-related research software tools and workflows of recognized scientific value. It is primarily intended to provide support for research software development, with some allowance for other costs that may be required to improve tools with significant user base or demonstrate potential for community adoption. Collaborations either within or across institutions are desirable and may include industry or academic partners.
Examples that address one or more challenges toward building robust software suitable for open science and modern computing include, but are not limited to:
- Adding application programming interfaces (APIs) and services to software, especially when compliant to community standards;
- Refactoring of software to incorporate standard interfaces and data formats, replace custom code with standard, hardened libraries;
- Refactoring software for portability and to scale efficiently on cloud or hybrid environments;
- Reducing coupling and complex shared state, allowing code to operate on diverse data sources and in collaboration with other services;
- Adopting standard input and output data formats including providing clean and well-documented input, output, and configuration that make scope software components more usable in composition via workflow languages and ensure that data exchanged by services maximizes the use of open data formats;
- Implementing standard logging models, improving performance through improved logging, monitoring, code profiling and optimization, taking advantage of parallelization, or use of graphics processing units (GPUs);
- Enhancing source code, documentation, version management and build/test tools to support community open-source development;
- Developing standard build and packaging tools to manage dependencies and produce containerized runtimes;
- Formatting packages for sharing via common package management tools appropriate to the language and environment;
- Enhancing standard unit and functional testing support and sample data sets for testing patches and upgrades;
Funding Information
The NIH ODSS intends to commit up to $6 million in FY25.
Project Period
A project duration of up to two years may be requested.
Eligibility Criteria
Higher Education Institutions
- Public/State Controlled Institutions of Higher Education
- Private Institutions of Higher Education
The following types of Higher Education Institutions are always encouraged to apply for NIH support as Public or Private Institutions of Higher Education:
- Hispanic-serving Institutions
- Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)
- Tribally Controlled Colleges and Universities (TCCUs)
- Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian Serving Institutions
- Asian American Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institutions (AANAPISIs)
Nonprofits Other Than Institutions of Higher Education
- Nonprofits with 501(c)(3) IRS Status (Other than Institutions of Higher Education)
- Nonprofits without 501(c)(3) IRS Status (Other than Institutions of Higher Education)
For-Profit Organizations
- Small Businesses
- For-Profit Organizations (Other than Small Businesses)
Local Governments
- State Governments
- County Governments
- City or Township Governments
- Special District Governments
- Indian/Native American Tribal Governments (Federally Recognized)
- Indian/Native American Tribal Governments (Other than Federally Recognized)
Federal Governments
- Eligible Agencies of the Federal Government
- U.S. Territory or Possession
Other
- Independent School Districts
- Public Housing Authorities/Indian Housing Authorities
- Native American Tribal Organizations (other than Federally recognized tribal governments)
- Faith-based or Community-based Organizations
- Regional Organizations
Foreign Organizations
- Non-domestic (non-U.S.) Entities (Foreign Organizations) are not eligible to apply.
- Non-domestic (non-U.S.) components of U.S. Organizations are not eligible to apply.
For more information, visit Grants.gov.
