Over the past five years, the Biocuration, FAIR Training and RDA Activities Focus Groups have played an important role in raising the visibility and significance of their areas within ELIXIR. As these groups draw to a close, we mark their achievements in embedding new areas across the infrastructure.
Focus Groups are short-term structures that form quickly in response to new or evolving topics. They complement ELIXIR’s more established Communities, which provide a longer-term framework for collaboration.
The activities of the three concluding Focus Groups will be integrated into ELIXIR Platforms, ensuring that their contributions continue to inform and strengthen the infrastructure’s direction. More details on each group’s work can be found on their respective webpages, linked below.
All group co-leads and members are thanked for their sustained and valuable efforts.
Biocuration Focus Group
The Biocuration Focus Group has strengthened collaboration among biocurators, promoted recognition of their contributions and supported training and career development within ELIXIR and the wider community.
The group has developed training resources, run hackathon projects and collaborated with the ELIXIR Training Platform to address gaps in biocuration skills. It awarded travel grants to support engagement at global events and worked with the International Society of Biocuration (ISB) to assess curators’ training needs. To advance career recognition, the group partnered with APICURON to promote transparent attribution systems for curators and database contributors, aiming for international endorsement. In addition, the group ran a webinar series on machine learning and text-mining tools and developed new training modules in partnership with ISB.
FAIR Training Focus Group
The FAIR Training Focus Group has successfully promoted the adoption of FAIR principles for training materials, enabling resources to be more accessible, reusable and sustainable across the global life science community.
The group has produced a wide portfolio of outputs, from the influential paper Ten Simple Rules for Making Training Materials FAIR to the development of Bioschemas Profiles. It engaged widely with the international training community through hackathons, workshops and conferences, and produced the FAIR Training Handbook as a practical guide for educators. Members contributed content to the Training Platform’s SPLASH website, helped refine the ELIXIR lesson template and delivered targeted workshops for Communities. Collectively, these efforts helped to make training materials FAIR by design, across ELIXIR and beyond.
RDA Activities Focus Group
The RDA Activities Focus Group has connected ELIXIR members with international Research Data Alliance (RDA) initiatives, ensuring life sciences were represented in global cross-domain discussions.
The group has supported ELIXIR’s involvement in a wide range of RDA Working and Interest Groups, including FAIR for Research Software, FAIR4ML, FAIRsharing and Data Discovery Paradigms. Members organised joint workshops at ELIXIR All Hands Meetings and contributed to international forums such as the EOSC Symposium and Global Open Research Commons. With support from ELIXIR travel grants, members regularly attended RDA Plenaries and shared the outcomes with the broader community. The Focus Group also conducted a landscape analysis of ELIXIR–RDA interactions and provided guidance to leadership in RDA structures, with ELIXIR-co-chairing the Life Science Data Infrastructures Interest Group.
ELIXIR’s long running engagement with the RDA will continue, building on the structures created by the Focus Group.