In November 2007, the NIH defined the standards for the submission of common measure data from the Autism Centers of Excellence (ACE) grantees. The policy for data submission was approved in February 2008. In June 2008, the first version of NDAR was released to ACE sites and NDAR continues to receive data from the ACEs. ACE data are expected to be received on a six-month cycle every January and July.

Implementation goals for NDAR in 2008 and 2009 include the following:

• Provide qualified researchers with query access to the data in NDAR to facilitate researcher collaboration.
• Receive genomic and brain imaging data.
• Provide linkages to available research data in other data repositories. Referred to as data federation, this will allow researchers to use the NDAR query tool to access and query data sets not maintained in the NDAR Data Repository.
• Establish partnerships with additional organizations to increase the data submissions to NDAR.
• Extend the data dictionary with a system to support researcher definition of the data elements used in autism research enabling researchers to quickly define new and innovative instruments for community review.
• Increase the number of measures and assessments supported by NDAR.