>>>!!!<<< As stated 2017-05-16 The BIRN project was finished a few years ago. The web portal is no longer live.>>>!!!<<< BIRN is a national initiative to advance biomedical research through data sharing and online collaboration. It supports multi-site, and/or multi-institutional, teams by enabling researchers to share significant quantities of data across geographic distance and/or incompatible computing systems. BIRN offers a library of data-sharing software tools specific to biomedical research, best practice references, expert advice and other resources.