• Extramural Investigators must be permanent employees of their institution at a level equivalent to a tenure-track professor or senior scientist with responsibilities that most likely include laboratory administration and oversight. Laboratory staff and trainees such as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows are not permitted to submit project requests.

• NIH Intramural Investigators must be tenure-track investigators, senior investigators, senior scientists, senior clinicians, or staff scientists.
• NIH extramural scientific staff must have administrative responsibility for the data; have substantial research involvement in the award that generated the data; or need access to carry out research unrelated to their portfolio management responsibilities.

• To log in and request access to controlled-access datasets you must have an eRA Commons account. If you do not have a pre-existing account, register here.
• For an overview of the entire process please see the NIH Extramural Investigator Data Access Request Flowchart.

• To establish an account in dbGaP, please submit the completed NIH Staff Request Form for Permission to Access Controlled-Access Data. Please submit the completed form to the GDS mailbox. You will be able to log in to dbGaP and apply for authorized access once you receive an email confirming that the request form was processed.
• For an overview of the entire process please see the NIH Staff Data Access Request Flowchart.

Respect for, and protection of the interests of research participants are fundamental to NIH’s stewardship of human genomic and associated phenotypic data. The NIH Genomic Data Sharing (GDS) Policy sets the expectation that the informed consent under which the data or samples were collected is the basis for determining the appropriateness of sharing data through unrestricted-access databases or NIH designated controlled-access data repositories (e.g. dbGaP).

Questions about the NIH GDS Policy? Review the NIH GDS FAQs or contact NIH GDS Policy staff.

The dbGaP Data Browser is a tool that allows approved users to find and view discrete regions of a dbGaP genomic sequence dataset, at nucleotide level resolution, without having to download the datasets to their local hardware. In addition to viewing genomic sequence data, approved browser users may view aggregate variant data (e.g., allele frequency) and individual genotypes, if available.  

In addition to the “Compilation of Individual-Level Data for General Research Use (GRU)” collection, users with approved project can also use the dbGaP Data Browser to view those data.  

To Log in to the portal as described for controlled-access data and select the “Data Browser” tab. Requests are made through a simplified controlled-access application.