2026 Chapters (Layout Features)

The COVID Information Commons—A Portal and Community for Researcher Collaboration

Hudson, Florence; Close, Lauren; Jackson, Esther M.; Rothenberg, Emily; Scherle, Ryan; Trinidad-Christensen, Jeremiah

The COVID Information Commons (CIC) was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2020 to develop a public access portal to facilitate the discovery of COVID-related research. The goal was to enable knowledge sharing and collaboration across NSF-funded COVID-related projects to accelerate research and mitigate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The success of the CIC as a portal and community, as well as the growth in COVID-19 pandemic-related research, led to the approval of a CIC-Extension (CIC-E) grant in 2021. With this extension, additional COVID-related research projects from NSF- and National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded researchers were added to the CIC, enabling cross-agency collaboration. The CIC has served as a valuable resource for thousands of researchers, students, and decision-makers in government, academia, nonprofits, and industry to collaborate and accelerate the most promising COVID research. This chapter describes the goal, process, and impact of the CIC as a research portal and collaborative community, presenting it as a role model for future societal challenges that can be addressed with scientific research and researcher engagement.