The ELIXIR Board held it's fifth meeting this week on 11-12 April in Prague, Czech Republic. The main points discussed included ELIXIR membership of Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg, ELIXIR Collaboration Agreements, Node Applications from Belgium, Italy and Slovenia, and the 2016 plan for ELIXIR implementation studies. The Board has also approved the revisions of ELIXIR's 2016 budget and Work Plan, and formally appointed new members of the ELIXIR Scientific Advisory Board and the ELIXIR Industry Advisory Committee.
Green light for Germany, Luxembourg and Ireland
The ELIXIR Board has approved the applications of Germany, Ireland and Luxembourg to join ELIXIR. The three countries will then become members once they ratify the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement, which is expected shortly. With these three countries, ELIXIR membership will round to 20.
Implementation studies
The Board has approved a portfolio of Implementation Studies for 2016. The main focus of these technical activities is to continue consolidation of ELIXIR’s collaboration with the Global Alliance of Genomics and Health, with extension to the ELIXIR Beacon project (led by ELIXIR Finland and ELIXIR Spain) and a new project on Data resources implementations for the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health Data Schema (led by ELIXIR Switzerland, ELIXIR France and EMBL-EBI). Another major theme for 2016 Implementation Studies is the integration of Node resources to ELIXIR platforms with a focus on resources within the domains of the ELIXIR Use Cases and supporting linking and mapping between Node data resources. ELIXIR will also initiate an Implementation Study on data identifier management and resolution in July 2016 (led by EMBL-EBI).
ELIXIR Nodes applications and Collaboration Agreements
Node Applications of Belgium, Italy and Slovenia were approved - the three countries will now work towards establishing Collaboration Agreements with the ELIXIR Hub. The Collaboration Agreements for France and Portugal were approved; this enables both countries to receive funding from the ELIXIR Hub for carrying out Implementation Studies.
Other topics discussed at the Board meeting included:
- ELIXIR Annual report 2015
- ELIXIR Ethics policy
- Commissioned Services Contracts for implementation studies
- Guidelines for pre-financing of implementation studies
- ELIXIR Node service delivery plans