Two new Communities have been formed in ELIXIR: Research Data Management (RDM) and Microbiome.
ELIXIR Communities bring together experts across ELIXIR Nodes and external partners to coordinate activities within specific areas. The addition of two Communities brings the number to 17, spanning domains such as human data, single-cell omics and Galaxy.
Research Data Management (RDM)
The RDM Community focuses on implementing FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open science principles. Led by Munazah Andrabi (ELIXIR UK), Flora D'Anna (ELIXIR Belgium), Niclas Jareborg (ELIXIR Sweden) and Mijke Jetten (ELIXIR Netherlands), it aims to unify RDM resources across ELIXIR leading to more sustainable data management practices. The Community will concentrate on four areas:
- People network: Establish a forum for life science RDM professionals to exchange knowledge and develop RDM service capacities across ELIXIR Nodes.
- RDM knowledge: Coordinate efforts to ensure RDM ecosystem content is up-to-date and collect input for enhancing the flow and FAIRness of data from research to repositories.
- RDM training: Provide a platform for exchanging best practices among RDM trainers, developing training materials, and establishing RDM learning paths.
- External stakeholders: Manage relationships with external stakeholders involved in RDM across ELIXIR Platforms Communities and Focus Groups.
Microbiome
The Microbiome Community aims to enhance microbiome research through the promotion of standards for sequence analysis and multi-omics integration. It focuses on identifying training gaps, methods, and reference databases and aims to scale bioinformatics infrastructures for microbiome research. The Community co-leads are Bérénice Batut (ELIXIR France), Rob Finn (EMBL-EBI) and Eric Pelletier (ELIXIR France). The Community is an evolution of the Marine Metagenomics Community, and has three broad goals:
- Develop standards for FAIR microbiome analyses: Establish controlled vocabularies, metadata quality checks, international collaboration for e-infrastructure harmonisation and dedicated training modules for microbiome metadata.
- Enhance tools and workflows: Improve annotation tools, leverage benchmarking initiatives, and share workflow designs for microbiome research, promoting best practices and federated computation.
- Build capacity and community engagement: Create a catalogue of training resources, address knowledge gaps and foster a community of trainers to represent the Microbiome Community's complexity and needs, including connecting with the industry and representing the Community at international levels.
About ELIXIR Communities
The ELIXIR Communities Handbook tells you what a Community is, who can join, what the benefits are, and how Communities are structured. It also contains links to key documents related to ELIXIR Communities, and explains the responsibilities and benefits of Community membership. A new version has been released for 2024.
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