Nine US universities are launching a publicly accessible network to connect scientists with information that is usually unavailable. The online network — dubbed 'eagle-i' by the project team — will give access to data held on the internal networks of institutions, which could include some of the country's top labs. Health researchers studying a particular group of people, for example, could access information on patient populations. The US$15-million pilot scheme is funded by the US National Center for Research Resources, which is also putting $12.2 million into funding the expansion of the cross-disciplinary collaboration network VIVO (see Nature 462, 123; 2009).