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The Next Steps in Our Open Science Project

We’re working to expand the public availability of our dietary data; open-access data is essential for developing equitable and effective strategies to overcome the problems faced by the global nutrition community. With an open exchange of information and ideas, we can better assess evidence, identify opportunities, build trust, and learn from each other’s experiences. 

Our corresponding members—primary data owners from around the world—play a critical role in this process by contributing their individual-level dietary data as inputs for our prediction model. But the potential impact doesn’t stop there. In fact, the next phase of our project is to invite our data owners to fortify their dedication to the open-science movement by making their primary data available on the GDD site.

The GDD prediction model is a novel resource that provides the global nutrition community with estimates of dietary intake that allows for precise comparisons across countries and across time. This resource is particularly useful for low-resource countries or for populations in which limited primary data is available. Primary dietary intake data, however, is a well-established resource can provide a unique understanding of the diet of a particular population. It’s for that reason that we want to make both our modeled estimates and our collated dietary survey data available for the world to access.

What Our Data Contributors Can Expect Next

The next phase of our project is to reconnect with our data owners to finalize a Data Sharing Agreement (DSA) and retrieve data at their finest level (microdata) for public dissemination on the GDD platform. If you choose to join this effort, please monitor your inbox for a prepared DSA and further instructions from info@globaldietarydatabase.org. Please note: if you have already signed and returned a DSA, we may ask you to sign an updated version to comply with the European privacy laws passed earlier this year (GDPR).

Your contribution will join that of over 200 data owners representing over 300 dietary surveys from 185 countries around the world. This effort will maximize the impact of your data on the global nutrition community and will allow your work to reach a wider audience.

If you have any questions about this phase of GDD, please contact us here.