EOSC-Life: developing an open collaborative space for digital biology in Europe

These days, the ability to exploit and understand research data is critical for the next advances in understanding of life and disease, addressing societal challenges and strengthening the bio-economy. To ensure that European Life Science remains at the forefront of global advances and to deepen research, scientific data along with its associated digital services must be findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) across scientific disciplines and national boundaries.

On 1 March 2019, Euro-BioImaging along with 12 other ESFRI Research Infrastructures in the Life Sciences domain joined forces to take on this challenge as part of the EOSC-Life project. This 23.7M € project, led by ELIXIR [link] with 46 different partners across Europe, will transform the fragmented research data landscape into an open collaborative space for digital biology in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). To achieve this, the 13 Research Infrastructures will publish research data from facilities and data resources in the EOSC and link these FAIR databases to open and reusable Tools and Workflows accessible to users via Europe’s national and international life-science clouds.

Community participation – from academia, industry, SMEs and regional bio-clusters - is paramount for the success of this four-year project and EOSC-Life will run a series of open calls between 2020 and 2021 to invite the research community’s engagement in challenging fields such as data access, integration, management and data analysis in the cloud.

Frauke Leitner of Euro-BioImaging as co-lead of WP3 within the EOSC-Life project commented: “We are excited to be part of this project and we will soon be reaching out for research community input as we develop open calls in AI, sensitive data and industry engagement”.