Weekly Brief, 20 February 2023

This week's highlights

Reminder: Call for new members of the Advisory Board of ELIXIRs Gateway on F1000Research

In 2023, we wish to expand the size of the current Advisory Board of ELIXIR's Gateway on F1000Research to be more representative of the geographic breadth of the ELIXIR Nodes, along with being more diverse in terms of nationality, areas of activity in ELIXIR, career stage, gender, and ethnic origin.

More information and how to apply

Survey on the Collaboration Strategy between ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons

Deadline: 28 February 2023

Please help us collate information on what the Australian BioCommons and ELIXIR Collaboration Strategy meant to you and how it could move forward.

After its launch in April 2020, the Collaboration Strategy had already achieved much at its mid-way point. As we work towards renewing the Collaboration Strategy in April 2023, we are keen to gather information on outcomes and impacts that have arisen from this Collaboration, along with your feedback. We are also very keen to hear your thoughts and ideas for the next stage of this Collaboration - hence you can answer this survey even if you have not yet been involved.

Fill out the mini-survey

Recommended reads

Supporting grant reviewers through the scientometric ranking of applicants

An ELIXIR-HU paper

Comparing the scientific output of different researchers applying for a grant is a tedious work. In Hungary, to help reviewers to rapidly rank the scientific productivity of a researcher, a grant decision support tool was established. In the present study, the authors goal was to assess the impact of this decision support tool on grant review procedures. The scientometric decision support tool can save time and increase transparency of grant review processes. The majority of reviewers found the ranking-based scientometric analysis useful when assessing the publication performance of an applicant.

Read more

COVoc and COVTriage: novel resources to support literature triage

A BiCIKL paper

COVID-19 pandemic has confronted the biomedical community with an unprecedented challenge. Front-line medical care, treatment research and vaccine development require rapid and informative interpretation of the literature and COVID-19 data produced around the world. To extract knowledge and enable interoperability across resources, the authors developed the COVID-19 Vocabulary (COVoc), an application ontology related to the research on this pandemic. The main objective of COVoc development was to enable seamless navigation from biomedical literature to core databases and tools of ELIXIR.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

Susanna Repo joined the ELIXIR Finland team

Dr Susanna Repo joined the ELIXIR Finland Node at CSC in January as a Program Manager in the Sensitive Data Management Unit. Susanna is also the Deputy Head of Node for ELIXIR Finland together with Dr Ilkka Lappalainen. Before joining CSC, Susanna Repo was leading the operations of ELIXIR Hub in Hinxton, UK.
In her role at CSC, Susanna looks forward to working with the team to strengthen the coordination of projects ELIXIR Finland participates in.

Read the news

DTL & Health-RI moving forward together in one organization - enabling data-driven health & life sciences

DTL is now merging with Health-RI into one strong organization for data-driven health & life sciences. As one of the Health-RI initiators, DTL has actively contributed to the design and construction of Health-RI's organization and program by using its experience, network and expertise.

Read the news

New ELIXIR-NL Service WikiPathways website

The ELIXIR-NL Service WikiPathways launched their new website, based on a new platform. The Graphical Pathway Markup Language is still central, but the website migration is part of a larger transition to a new publishing solution, allowing the project to implement new ideas and new features.

Check the new website

Job Opportunity: Scientific training Officers at the Swedish national Training Hub

Deadline: 20 March 2023

The Swedish node is involved in establishing a national Training Hub within the life science Research Infrastructure SciLifeLab. The Training Hub is now hiring 1-2 open and empathic Scientific Training Officers.

More information

SIB catalyzes Open Research Data (ORD) practices in Switzerland

Several ORD projects, from multi-omics data integration to a curriculum for data stewards, that are led by or involving SIB Members have been awarded funding by swissuniversties. Find out more about these efforts which are bringing together leading Swiss institutions and are aligned with the principles of the SwissBioData ecosystem proposal, co-led by SIB.

Read the news

Updates from Platforms

Reminder for Training Platform F2F meeting

7-9 March 2023 | Hybrid - Rome, Italy

The Training Platform, including all of ELIXIRs Training Coordinators, will meet to share updates and jointly work on open Training related aspects and ELIXIR Training Platform tasks. This year is particularly important in light of the 2024-2028 Scientific Programme Developments. The meeting will include presentations covering both past and future activities and participant engagement.

More information and registration

Updates from Communities

Invitation to join the ELIXIR Plant Sciences Community F2F/hybrid Meeting

20 & 21 April 2023 | Hybrid - Paris, France
Registration deadline: 23 March (F2F) | 20 April (virtual)

This hybrid meeting is for members of the ELIXIR Plant Sciences Community. It will address general Community updates, short presentations, updates about the ongoing Implementation Study and an outlook on activities and actions for the coming months, as well as the 2024-2028 ELIXIR Programme.

Find out more and register now

Updates from Focus Groups

Biocuration Focus Group highlight presentation

27 February 2023 | 16:00 -17:00 CET

The Biocuration focus group will host 2 highlight presentations in its next call.

• The first talk will be from Karen Yook and Daniela Raciti on microPublication by the Executive Editors. They will talk about their work making curation part of the publishing workflow before article publication.
• The second talk will be from Hans-Michael Muller (Textpresso PI ) will describe how Textpresso provides text mining and text classification post-publication to support biocurators at a range of resources including WormBase.

Agenda and Zoom link

Updates from Other Initiatives

The second round of selection for Global Core Biodata Resources

Call for expressions open on 11 April 2023

GCBRs are deposition databases and knowledgebases of fundamental importance to the broad life science community and the long-term preservation of biological data. The first GCBR selection round, in 2022, resulted in 37 biodata resources being included in the initial GCBR list.

This second round will provide an opportunity for biodata resources which meet the GCBR criteria, but were not able to engage in the 2022 round to participate during the early establishment of the GCBR list.

Information and instructions for applicants

Call for respondents: How do research infrastructures support the FAIR data principles in life science research practice?

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) Life Science Data Infrastructures Interest Group is looking for a few more respondents to a pilot survey aimed at understanding more about data infrastructures, the data and community(ies) they support, and how they address the FAIR data principles.

The team is looking to interview managers/representatives of data infrastructures located across continents. The interviews will be carried out by the Chairs of the Life Science Data Infrastructures Interest Group who reside in the same continent Wolmar Nyberg kerstrm (ELIXIR-SE) for Europe.

Please contact wolmar.n.akerstrom [at] uu.se (Wolmar Nyberg kerstrm) to participate or suggest someone

Upcoming ELIXIR events & webinars

ELIXIR Training Courses & Webinars

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

PerMedCoE webinar: Interrogating the effect of enzyme kinetics on metabolism using differentiable constraint-based models
22 February 2023 |15:00 -16:00 CET | Online

BioSB Series: Knowledge graphs in the life sciences
13-17 March 2023 | Wageningen, the Netherlands

SIB course: Reproducible research with R: from data management to communication of results
23-24 March 2023 | Lausanne, Switzerland

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

Training Platform 2023 F2F meeting
7-9 March 2023 | Hybrid - Rome, Italy

ELIXIR Innovation and SME Forum: AI in Health Research
13 April 2023 | Utrecht, the Netherlands

ELIXIR All Hands 2023
5-8 June 2023 | Dublin, Ireland

BioHackathon Europe 2023
30 October - 3 November 2023 | Barcelona, Spain

Job vacancies

All vacancies are also published on the ELIXIR website (also including those from industry). If you need our help communicating your new open positions, you can submit a job advertisement and it will automatically appear on our newsletters. Go to our vacancy page to submit a job
 

Clinical Data Curator

IBEC and CRG

EGA Operations Manager

CRG

EGA Bioinformaticians

CRG

Bioinformatics Software Developer in Protein Structure and Genetic Variant Modelling

Imperial College London

Node coordinator

ELIXIR Norway