SOURCE//PUBLIC · Volume 1 · Editorial field guide
NIH: beyond the paper
Biomedical software lives across packages, workflows, registries and laboratories.
Research University editorial desk · October 29, 2026. Prepared with ChatGPT; Chief Editor: Dr. Freedom Cheteni. Editorial resource; independent human peer review is not recorded. No new funding, experimental results or DOI are claimed.
Trace support
Use NIH RePORTER to identify projects and investigators, then inspect publications and software availability statements. NIH guidance recognizes multiple distribution forms: code, packages, workflows, containers, services and APIs.
Use specialized discovery
Search NITRC, NCI ITCR, Bioconductor, PhysioNet, Dockstore, SciCrunch and bio.tools as appropriate to the field. These resources have different scopes. Inclusion in a community registry is not evidence that every tool or release received NIH support.
Make reuse concrete
Record a version, dependencies, license, installation instructions and example inputs. Separate public code availability from permission to access clinical data. Record whether a workflow has merely been described or actually reproduced.
Primary discovery sources
These links support discovery and the described institutional scope. They do not establish funding or reproducibility for individual software packages.
- NIH RePORTER ↗ — Funding
- NIH GitHub Resource Center ↗ — Directory
- NIH research resources ↗ — Directory
- NITRC ↗ — Software ecosystem
- NCI ITCR tools ↗ — Catalog
- PhysioNet ↗ — Research ecosystem