Unlock New Opportunities in Sleep Research with the NSRR!
by Alice Braga, Ph.D. | Sleep Research Network
The National Sleep Research Resource (NSRR) was created in 2013 to compile a vast database of de-identified physiological and clinical data to support sleep and circadian research. In March 2025, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) renewed its support for the NSRR through 2030.
🔬 High quality data come from a variety of data sources, including well-researched cohorts and successful clinical trials, clinical databases, and experimental human and animal studies. These data can be accessed through a single web portal, offering researchers opportunities to advance sleep and circadian science by supporting secondary data analysis, algorithmic development, and signal processing. In addition, researchers may use these data to develop review papers or perform analyses to generate pilot data to inform new studies.
The NSRR initially used data from several large NIH-funded cohort studies to build its foundation, successfully proving the value of a larger sleep data commons. Over the past 12 years, the NSRR has continuously ingested new data, currently housing over nine terabytes of data from 50 unique datasets. NSRR also developed bioinformatic infrastructures including vocabularies and ontologies that serve as a foundation facilitating web-based data pooling, and has deployed approaches for sharing complex physiological signals, genetics, and phenotypic data across diverse scientific communities, including enabling cross-linkages with other repositories. NSRR has developed enhanced signal processing algorithms and provides efficient workflows to extract and enhance the quality of signals available from overnight sleep studies in various data sets, leading to identification of new physiological signatures, facilitating harmonization and aggregation across datasets, and accelerated research productivity. The NSRR has enabled an engaged research community that is growing through empowered access to rigorous data and capacity for “big data” sleep analyses and opportunities for learning through webinars and blogs. To date, approximately two (2) petabytes of data have been shared with almost 11,000 users worldwide, resulting in over 400 publications and the award of eighteen (18) funded US research grants and other projects.
Members can also:
✅ Contribute their own data to expand the database
✅ Utilize and partner with NSRR to meet NIH (and journal) data sharing requirements
✅ Provide feedback on the database and NSRR’s processes
How to Join the NSRR Community:
- Visit sleepdata.org and complete the sign-up process
- Browse the database page and click Request Data Access
- The NSRR Data Access Committee will review your request within 1–2 weeks
Once approved, you’ll gain access to:
✔️ A forum for engaging with other researchers
✔️ Tools to advance your sleep research
✔️ A blog to stay updated on new datasets and research developments
Interested in sharing your own data? Members can contribute datasets by:
🔹 Providing all relevant documentation
🔹 Including data dictionaries and descriptions
🔹 Ensuring all data is fully de-identified (both datasets and raw data)
🔹 Uploading files securely via the Secure File Transport Protocol
With recruitment challenges affecting many sleep researchers, the NSRR offers a powerful solution — connecting researchers with invaluable data to advance the field.
➡️ Learn more and sign up today: sleepdata.org