Weekly Brief, 21 August 2023

This week's highlights

EBIF: Trusted research environment for sharing data in life sciences

21 November 2023 | London, UK


This years EBIF will focus on "Trusted research environment for sensitive data in the life sciences". The programme features a variety of presentations from industry and academia, offering the participants a chance to learn more about ELIXIR, relevant initiatives and research breakthroughs and outcomes.

More information and registration

Bringing FAIR RDM to researchers at scale


In July, Katharina Heil from ELIXIR Hub and Frederik Coppens from ELIXIR Belgium gave a talk on ELIXIRs FAIR RDM Ecosystem in a webinar hosted by Australian Research Data Commons - ARDC. The recording of the webinar is now online.

Check the recording

Job vacancy: Science Officer - Bioinformatics Tools & Training

ELIXIR is seeking an experienced bioinformatician who can combine technical understanding of current trends in bioinformatics software with experience of training for bioinformatics researchers.

Find out more

Recommended reads

Building expertise on FAIR through evolving Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) workshops

An ELIXIR-NL published preprint

Since 2014, Bring Your Own Data workshops (BYODs) have been organised to inform people about the process and benefits of making resources FAIR, and the FAIRification process. The BYOD workshops content and format differ depending on their goal, context, and the background and needs of participants. In this paper, the authors detail the three different structures of the BYODs and describe examples of early BYODs related to plant breeding data, and rare disease registries and biobanks, which have shaped the structure of the workshops.

Read more

Operator dashboard for controlling the NeIC SensitiveData Archive

A BioHackathon paper

Human genome and phenome data is classified as special categories data under the EU GDPR legislation. This requires special care to be taken when processing and reusing this data for research. To enable this in a compliant way, a federated approach was applied to the existing European Genome-phenome Archive, creating the Federated EGA in 2022. To standardise this workflow and make the system easier to use, the authors decided to build a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) for such an Operator Dashboard during the ELIXIR Biohackathon 2022.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

Open data to power up the blue economy


The blue economy harnesses the enormous potential of marine resources for economic growth and improved livelihoods, while also avoiding overexploitation and negative environmental impacts. In EMBL-EBIs latest article, Senior Scientist Rob Finn explains why data coordination and sharing are fundamental for a sustainable blue economy.

Read more

Better treatments for leukaemia

Professor Merja Heinniemi and her research team at the University of Eastern Finland use computational methods to interpret cancer samples in order to determine which cellular processes are defective and how cells behave during drug treatments.

Read the news

Building capacity for data stewardship in the Netherlands: formal job profiles, training and career perspective


In April 2023, the Workshop Data Stewards Job Profiles: Build and Sustain Capacity for FAIR Implementation was organised to discuss the status and lessons learnt from the adoption and implementation of official data stewards job profiles at different Research Performing Organisations in the Netherlands. The report and slide deck are now available on Zenodo

Read the blog post for workshop findings

Updates from Communities

Register for the Galaxy Community meeting

4-6 October 2023 | Hybrid - Freiburg, Germany
Registration deadline: 18 September (in person) | 3 October (online)


The Galaxy Community will hold its F2F/hybrid Meeting in October. The meeting is integrated into the European Galaxy Days. The meeting will include presentations, workshops and participant engagement.

More information and registration

Register for the 3D BioInfo Community meeting

15 - 17 November 2023 | Hybrid - Prague, Czech Republic
Registration deadline: 15 September (in person) | online registration will open closer in time


The 3D BioInfo Community will hold its F2F/hybrid Meeting in November. The meeting is a part of a larger event, coordinate jointly by the ELIXIR 3D BioInfo Community together with the 3D-SIG Structural Bioinformatics Community of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB). There will be time for updates, presentations, progress reports, posters and discussions.

More information and registration

Register for the Toxicology Community F2F/hybrid Meeting

20 September 2023 | Hybrid - Brussels, Belgium
Registration deadline: 1 September (in person) | 19 September (online)


The meeting aims to advance the implementation study, promote FAIR practices in toxicology data management. and discuss collaboration with the Partnership for the Assessment of Risks from Chemicals (PARC) and other toxicology projects, for leveraging the FAIRification of toxicology data and ELIXIR life sciences infrastructure for toxicology. The meeting will be held after the PARC WP7 meeting.

Find out more and register now

Updates from other initiatives

Trailblazing and fostering synergies between Industry & Academia


Open Access to scientific literature can accelerate collaborations between these stakeholders, while giving a boost to the national innovation activity. This Pathos case study focuses on the role the Portuguese open access infrastructure RCAAP plays in fostering this collaboration and scientific research activity on an open access basis.

Read the blog post

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

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

Emerging Microbiome/Marine Metagenomics Community meeting
12-13 September 2023 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain

Biodiversity Community F2F & Implementation Study meeting
13-15 September 2023 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain

Toxicology Community meeting
20 September 2023 | Hybrid - Brussels, Belgium

Galaxy Community meeting
4-6 October 2023 | Hybrid - Freiburg, Germany

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

3D BioInfo Community meeting
15-17 November 2023 | Hybrid - Prague, Czech Republic

Federated human data (FHD) Community meeting
16-17 November 2023 | Hybrid - 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
 

IT System Administrator for Science-IT

Technical University of Munich

PhD position in "Machine learning tools and Interoperability resources for the management and analysis of biomedical data in the context of the European infrastructure ESFRI ELIXIR"

Biocomputing group - University of Bologna

Auxiliary RESEARCHER (M/F) in the area of Bioinformatics/Data Science

Centro de Ciencias do Mar (CCMAR)

Semantic Web Architect

UK CEH

Auxiliary RESEARCHER (M/F) in the area of Bioinformatics/Data Science

Centro de Ciencias do Mar (CCMAR)