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The NIH funds 18 Common Fund programs — each generating valuable datasets, each with its own data formats, metadata standards, and portals. Individually, they’re useful. Together, they could be transformative. The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) was built to make that integration real.

This preprint describes the evolution, architecture, and practical outcomes of CFDE: a collaborative infrastructure that links Common Fund programs and makes their data findable, accessible, and reusable across program boundaries.

Open access is the practice of making scientific research freely available to anyone, without paywalls or embargo periods. This post explains what it is, why it matters, and what NIH, NSF, and funders around the world now require.

Senescent cells — cells that have permanently stopped dividing in response to stress — are a fundamental feature of aging, yet remarkably little is known about where they are, how many exist, or how they change across a human lifespan. The NIH SenNet Consortium was established to answer those questions at scale.

This Perspective lays out the goals, approach, and infrastructure of SenNet: a Common Fund initiative to comprehensively map senescent cells across 18 human tissues and build a publicly available atlas.