Weekly Brief 11 December 2017

Hub updates

We are organising parallel flash talk sessions as part of the ELIXIR All Hands meeting 2018. Please help us to choose the flash talk themes by voting for themes from our list or proposing a new one.

The first draft of ELIXIR 2019-23 Programme has been shared with the HoN for initial feedback. This feedback will guide the finalisation of the first draft which will in January be shared with the ELIXIR SAB. In addition, ELIXIR Nodes will be asked to provide feedback on the first draft through a consultation process scheduled to open mid-January.

Help us promote ELIXIR Nodes during our twitter Christmas Campaing. Each day until Christmas, we'll be highlighting resources from ELIXIR Nodes; you will find all of them via the hashtag #20DaysofNodes

Serena Scollen is now on maternity leave and we wish her good luck. The main point of contact for Human Data related matters during Serena's leave is Pascal Kahlem (pkahlem@googlemail.com).

Susheel Varma has moved from the post of ELIXIR Human Data Technical Coordinator at ELIXIR Hub and is starting a new role at EMBL-EBI as ELIXIR Competency Centre Project Manager. We thank Suhseel for his hard work at ELIXIR Hub and wish him all the very best in the new job!

OECD and CODATA have published report Business models for sustainable research data repositories that explores business models of 48 research data repositories and provides recommendations to support their sustainable funding. Representatives from ELIXIR have contributed to the report through several workshops. Another report by OECD is explores the challenges and enablers for the effective functioning of international research data networks.

ELIXIR Board appointed four new members to the ELIXIR Industry Advisory Committee. We welcome Abel Ureta Vidal (Eagle Genomics, UK), Filip Pattyn (Ontoforce, Belgium), Andreas Kremer (ITTM Solutions, Luxembourg) and Ian P Barrett (Astra Zeneca, UK).

Updates from Platforms

Save the dates for the upcoming ELIXIR-EXCELERATE Train the Trainer courses:

Details on each individual training will follow closer their start dates. The Galaxy Working Group is organising a Galaxy Admin Workshop on 8-12 January 2018 in Oslo, Norway. Register online.
A release candidate of biotoolsSchema v3.0.0 - the formalised XML schema (XSD) for bioinformatics software used by bio.tools - is now available at GitHub.

Updates from Nodes

ELIXIR Germany (de.NBI) offers a winter school on on Computational Metabolomics on 5-8 March 2018 in Wittenberg, Germany. The application deadline is 15 January 2018. Balasz Győrffy, Head of Node for ELIXIR Hungary, published a paper in Briefings in Bioinformatics on sustainability of bioinformatics web-based services

Job board

ELIXIR Norway is seeking a Bioinformatician for a 4 year position at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. The focus will be on structural- and functional genomics and bioinformatics in fish.

ELIXIR Norway also seeks a Senior Engineer/Chief Engineer to develop and maintain software and systems for the analysis and sharing of sensitive biomedical data. The role will support the 4 Nordic ELIXIR nodes and Tryggve2

And finally, ELIXIR Norway are advertising a newly established and permanent Administrative Coordinator position at the Department of Informatics within the Computational Biology Unit (CBU), University of Bergen.

ELIXIR UK seeks a Training Impact Co-ordinator based at The Bioinformatics Training Facility, University of Cambridge.

Upcoming events

The ELIXIR TeSS portal has a variety of interesting events and courses organised by the ELIXIR Nodes.

ELIXIR events
6 December 2017 | Online
ELIXIR Webinar: Process for the selection of ELIXIR Core Data Resources

20 December 2017 | Online
ELIXIR Webinar: Improvements to Ensembl

1-2 February 2017 | Hinxton, Cambridgeshire, UK
ELIXIR Scientific Advisory Board meeting

24-25 April 2018 | Tel Aviv
ELIXIR Board meeting

4-7 June 2018 | Berlin, Germany
ELIXIR All Hands meeting

12-13 November 2018 | Ljubljana, Slovenia
ELIXIR Board meeting 2017 ELIXIR - Hub
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