The EC launched a COVID-19 data platform, which will allow sharing and analysing coronavirus data at unprecedented speed and can boost Open Science and EOSC.
In order to tackle global crises like the current COVID-19 pandemic, researchers and governments across borders need to work closely together. The European Commission (EC) has therefore announced a set of short-term coordinated research and innovation actions, the ERAvsCorona Action Plan, which was adopted by the EU research and innovation ministers on 7 April. Action 9 out of 10 in the plan aims to establish a European data exchange platform for SARS-CoV-2 and coronavirus-related information in the broader sense, connected to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The quick sharing of research data and results should accelerate discoveries and combat the current crisis.
The EC translated this promise into action quickly; already on 20 April, they launched the COVID-19 Data Platform as a portal for COVID-19 research. The platform will provide an open, trusted and scalable environment, where researchers can store and share data sets ranging from DNA sequences, protein structures, clinical research outcomes and trial results to epidemiological data. It is the result of a collaboration between the EC, the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI), the Elixir infrastructure, which unites European life science organisations in managing data, and the COMPARE Project, a research network to share data on infectious diseases and outbreaks, as well as EU Member States and other partners. The platform is in line with the EC’s overall commitment to Open Science and serves at the same time as a pilot for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
The platform will work via the alignment of national infrastructures, European infrastructures like EMBL-EBI and H2020 projects, and will build on open standards in line with EOSC. Elixir will link these infrastructures into interconnected European data spaces and allow for data from ongoing European projects and national research programmes to be widely shared and reused. On top of sharing the data, Elixir is monitoring and providing an overview of national level activities and data sets to make sure that relevant sources can be linked to the portal. The data platform will also accelerate the Federated European Genome-Phenome Archive (FEGA) and align with the plans to enable access of national genomic, phenomic and clinical data collected as part of the ‘1+Million Genomes Initiative’, a common declaration which started in April 2018 and is now supported by 22 EU Member States and associated countries.
As a precedent for EOSC, the COVID-19 data platform will provide valuable insights and demonstrate how research data in a particular domain can be shared and reused according to FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) principles by building on and federating existing infrastructures.