Weekly Brief 10 December 2018

Hub Updates

The ELIXIR 5th Anniversary conference, is taking place tomorrow on 11 December in Brussels. If you can't attend in person, you can follow it on twitter via #ELIXIR5.

The First EJP RD Joint Transnational Call for funding multilateral research projects on rare diseases was launched last week under the EJP-COFUND mechanism

Following the successful recent BioHackathon in Paris, ELIXIR is starting to plan a follow-on event for the second half of 2019. If you would like to join the Programme Committee, please contact Jen Harrow at the Hub by 21 December 21.

Platform updates

The ELIXIR Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) team (ELIXIR Czech Republic and ELIXIR Netherlands) organised a successfull hackathon in Prague with FAIRsharing (ELIXIR UK, Oxford), TeSS (ELIXIR-UK, Manchester, Oxford) and EeLP (ELIXIR Slovenia) teams. The hackathon aimed at developing integrations between ELIXIR registries to inform researchers about Data Stewardship. Other outputs include a MoU between FAIRsharing and the DSW to share information and a workplan to further connect and integrate FAIRsharing and TeSS.

As a part of the ELIXIR EXCELERATE Data Platform work, EuropePMC (one of the ELIXIR Core Data Resources) is conducting a survey to get a better understanding of specific biocuration needs. Please bring the survey to the attention of any curators that you know. The survey should take about 5 minutes to complete, and the results will be invaluable to this initiative. Many thanks!

"Making Software a First-Class Citizen in Research speed blog post from the Workshop on Sustainable Software for Science: Practice and Experience (WSSSPE 6.1) co-authored by the Software Development Best Practices WG (working group) is now published and available on the SSI (Software Sustainability Institute) website.

Recent paper explores automated workflow composition in mass spectrometry-based proteomics, using a toolkit to support researchers in identifying, comparing and benchmarking multiple workflows from individual bioinformatics tools.

Another paper presents reproducible workflows using Galaxy, Bioconda and BioContainers.

Updates from Communities

Nominate a training for the 2019 Galaxy Community Conference! The Conference will take place in Freiburg, Germany, 1-6 July 2019. It will start with one day of training and then three days with more specialized training sessions aligned with talks. The training topics will be determined by the community.

Read the report from the European Galaxy Days on 19 and 20 November 2018 in Freiburg, Germany.

Updates from Nodes

New initiative by the Health Institute Carlos III (ISCIII) to boost bioinformatics in hospitals will incorporate 16 bioinformaticians into Health Research Institutes in Spain from January 2019. INB/ELIXIR Spain will support them and collaborate with their units as part of the Translational Bioinformatics Network (TransBioNet) launched earlier this year.

Registrations are open for the SIB course on Introduction to Statistics, in Bellinzona on 22-25 January 2019.

Registration is open for the ELIXIR Finland course Single cell RNA-seq data analysis with Chipster, in Espoo on 14-15 March 2019.

Job board

The National Centre for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC, part of ELIXIR Spain) is seeking a candidate to work on the 3DBIONOTES project.

The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (part of ELIXIR Netherlands) has an open tenure track position in Bioinformatics or Statistical Machine Learning. Applications need to be received by 19 December 2018.

The Centre for Genomic Regulation (part of ELIXIR Spain) is currently looking to fill the Postdoctoral Position on Human Genomics Data. The successful candidate will co-load the curation and enrichment of EGA metadata and raw data in a context of HPC and Big Data.

University of Bielefeld (Lead institute of de.NBI - ELIXIR Germany) and ZB MED - Information Centre for Life Sciences are hiring a Professor of Service Science in the Life Sciences. Deadline for applications is 10 December 2018.

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is currently looking for an Data Security Technologist.

The SIB Text Mining group in Geneva (part of ELIXIR Switzerland) is looking for three associate researchers.

The Caesar Foundation, based in Bonn, Germany, is currently looking to fill the position of Head of Scientific Computing. The primary goal of the research group will be to provide a central resource for scientific algorithm development, data analysis, image anaylsis, machine learning expertise and software development.

Upcoming events

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

ELIXIR events

11 December 2018 | Brussels, Belgium
ELIXIR 5th Anniversary Event

12 December | Brussels, Belgium
HoN meeting

5-6 March 2019 | Stockholm, Sweden
ELIXIR Innovation and SME event: Genomics and Associated Data in National Healthcare Initiatives