ELIXIR has today announced its first portfolio of Recommended Interoperability Resources (RIRs) to facilitate interoperability and reusability of life science data and support the principles of FAIR data management.

The Recommended Interoperability Resources have been selected by external panel of reviewers, based on the selection criteria published in the Call for RIR application, which measure how they facilitate scientific research and how they improve FAIRness of life science data. The portfolio include ten tools and registries from across ELIXIR Nodes and include resources for standards and APIs, applications, integrators and pipelines.

The portfolio is managed by the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform, which supports people and machines to discover, access, integrate and analyse biological data. It encourages the life science community to adopt standardised file formats, metadata, vocabularies, workflows, and identifiers.

The portfolio of ELIXIR Recommended Interoperability Resources will be regularly evaluated for quality assurance and quality control. Further resources will be included in future calls for RIR application (next one in 2019) as ELIXIR evolves, accommodating emerging technologies and changing scientific needs. Recommendations for use of RIRs should also be recognised as suggestions and not mandate as we value emerging developments from our ELIXIR members based on upcoming ELIXIR use case requirements.

Acknowledgments

This announcement is the culmination of a long selection process which involved many people within and outside ELIXIR. We would like to especially thank to the panel of external expert reviewers, and ELIXIR technical coordinators who evaluated the candidate resource applications, and the representatives of all the ELIXIR interoperability resources who participated in the process.