Weekly Brief, 11 December 2023

This week's highlights

Celebrating ten years of ELIXIR

Last week, ELIXIR celebrated its 10th anniversary in Brussels, Belgium!
ELIXIR was launched on 18 December 2013 following the ratification of the ELIXIR Consortium Agreement by five countries and EMBL. Over this time, ELIXIRs core mission has remained unchanged: to enable researchers to access and analyse life science data by coordinating infrastructure and services across national borders.

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Expression of Interest for Human Data Communities Steering Group *

Deadline: 15 December 2023

ELIXIR would like to invite an Expression of Interest for funding four members for the Human Data Communities Steering Group to support the development of the ELIXIR strategy, ensuring alignment of external and internal projects for the area of Human Data and Translational Research as outlined in the ELIXIR Programme 2024-2028.

Interested individuals are asked to express their interest by completing the form below by Friday, 15 December 2023 (23:59 CET). Selections will be made by 19 January 2024. For any questions, please contact Serena Scollen

Human Data Communities Steering Group Form

* Please note that the EoI is being circulated again via a different survey tool, due to technical issues found in the previous EoI.

Recommended reads

Community-driven governance of FAIRness assessment: an open issue, an open discussion

ELIXIR Interoperability Platform

Although FAIR Research Data Principles are targeted at and implemented by different communities, research disciplines, and research stakeholders, there is no conclusive way to determine the level of FAIRness intended or required to make research artefacts FAIR. The FAIR Principles cover all types of digital objects, metadata, and infrastructures. This whitepaper identifies three high-level stakeholder categories -FAIR decision and policymakers, FAIR custodians, and FAIR practitioners - and provides examples outlining specific stakeholders' needs. It can serve as a starting point to foster an open discussion around FAIRness governance and the mechanism(s) that could be used to implement it, to be trusted, broadly representative, appropriately scoped, and sustainable.

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Scalable, accessible, and reproducible reference genome assembly and evaluation in Galaxy

A BioHackathon paper

Improvements in genome sequencing and assembly are enabling high-quality reference genomes for all species. However, the assembly process is still laborious, computationally and technically demanding, lacks standards for reproducibility, and is not readily scalable. The authors present the latest Vertebrate Genomes Project assembly pipeline and demonstrate that it delivers high-quality reference genomes at scale across a set of vertebrate species. The pipeline is freely accessible through Galaxy, accommodating researchers even without local computational resources and enhanced reproducibility by democratizing the training and assembly process. The authors demonstrate the flexibility and reliability of the pipeline by assembling reference genomes for 51 vertebrate species from major taxonomic groups.
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Updates from other initiatives

BY-COVID featured as a success story in the CORDIS results pack on research infrastructures in Europe

The CORDIS Results Pack highlights the work of 13 Horizon 2020- and Horizon Europe- funded projects that are helping to advance scientific knowledge and technological progress supporting European society in facing current and future challenges. BY-COVID is featured as a success story in the results pack.

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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

ELIXIR Compute Platform 2024 Face-to-Face Meeting
24 January 2024 | Brno, Czech Republic

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
 

Digital Content Editor

ELIXIR

Predoctoral research assistant for GENCODE project

Spanish National Cancer Research Center (CNIO)

Bioinformatics Scientist/Research Software Engineer (Jalview)

University of Dundee

Post Doctoral Researcher (Level 1 or 2) in Cancer Digital Health Real World Evidence

University of Limerick

CarrerasLeaders postdoctoral fellowships in blood cancers

Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC)