Weekly Brief, 20 November 2023

This week's highlights

ELIXIR Director and interim Director updates

Niklas Blomberg will be moving on from his role as ELIXIRs Director at the end of this year to join the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) as Executive Director. In October, the ELIXIR Board approved the recommendation from the Director Search Committee on a preferred candidate for new Director. The name and starting date of the new Director will be confirmed in due course. For the interim period, the ELIXIR Board also approved that Andy Smith, Head of External Relations, will act as interim Director, starting 1 December 2023.

ELIXIR All Hands 2024 call for workshops

Deadline: 26 January 2024

Call for workshops for ELIXIR All Hands 2024 is now open. The aim of workshops is to build connections between different areas of ELIXIR, encouraging groups to participate and engage with the work.

Find out more
Link for submissions

Hacking through BioHackathon Europe

Bringing 350 bioinformaticians together, BioHackathon Europe 2023 kicked off on 30 October 2023 in Barcelona, Spain. Over the week, participants onsite and online worked collaboratively on 35 bioinformatics projects, ranging from genomic and health data to FAIR data and research data management.

Read more

Recommended reads

EOSC-Life recommendations for implementation of FAIR principles in life science data handling

An EOSC-Life paper

The main goals and challenges for the life science communities in the Open Science framework are to increase reuse and sustainability of data resources, software tools, and workflows, especially in large-scale data-driven research and computational analyses. Here, the authors present key findings, procedures, effective measures and recommendations for generating and establishing sustainable life science resources based on the collaborative, cross-disciplinary work done within the EOSC-Life consortium. Using lessons learned from 27 selected projects, the authors describe the organisational, technical, financial and legal/ethical challenges that represent the main barriers to sustainability in the life sciences and show how EOSC-Life provides a model for sustainable data management according to FAIR principles.

Read more

Building expertise on FAIR through evolving Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) workshops

An ELIXIR-NL Paper

Since 2014, Bring Your Own Data workshops (BYODs) have been organised to inform people about the process and benefits of making resources FAIR. The BYOD workshops content and format differ depending on their goal, context, and the background and needs of participants. Data-focused BYODs educate domain experts on how to make their data FAIR to find new answers to research questions. These BYODs intend to foster collaboration between different types of stakeholders involved in data management, curation, and reuse. In this paper, the authors detail the three different structures of BYODs and discuss the latest insights into making BYODs more productive by leveraging our almost ten years of training experience in these workshops, including successes and encountered challenges.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

VIB and ELIXIR Belgium training courses in 2024

The programme for VIB and ELIXIR Belgium courses are online for Q1 2024. The topics of the workshops include data analysis, statistics, and programming. More courses will be added for the remainder of 2024. Check the website and save the dates of courses! ELIXIR Belgiums training materials are also listed on TeSS.

Discover the whole programme here

Updates from Communities

3DSig: Latest Developments in Structural Bioinformatics

21 November 2023 | 17:00 - 18:00 CET | Online

The 3D BioInfo is holding a webinar focusing on 3Dsig to discuss the latest developments in structural bioinformatics. The webinar will be chaired by Prof. Shoshana Wodak with talks from Dr Eli Draizen (UC San Francisco) and Alberto Borsatto (University of Geneva).

More information and registration

Updates from Focus Groups

Environmental Impact Focus Group meeting

30 November 2023 |10:00-11:00 CET

Environmental Impact Focus Group will explore ways to assess and minimise the environmental impact of ELIXIR, and of data handling in general. We will raise awareness about the issues and solutions.

More details of the Focus Group can be found on the webpage
Register now

Updates from other initiatives

1+MG Framework and Roadmap launch

The 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG) Initiative launched the 1+MG Framework website and adopted the 1+MG Roadmap 2023-27, which together pave the way for implementing genomics for personalised healthcare and research in Europe.

Find out more

Consultations on Sustaining Biodata Infrastructure & Open Data Strategies

The Global Biodata Coalition is seeking feedback and input from its communities on two consultation papers. These papers explore how research funders could extend partnerships and work together in new ways to secure and sustain the global biodata resource infrastructure and maximise the long-term value of open research data in the life and biomedical sciences.

Provide your views

Documenting mapping community practices

24 November 2023 | 10:00-13:00 CET | Online

FAIR-IMPACT is holding a series workshops to discuss issues around mappings and crosswalks and how they can become shareable and reusable, i.e. FAIR, elevating them to first class citizens in the FAIR data world.

Find out more

Bioschemas monthly community call

27 November 2023 | 17:00-18:00 CET | Online

The meeting will report on outcomes from BioHackathon projects and an analysis of LiveDeploys.

More information

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 Bioinformatics Industry Forum: Trusted research environments for sharing data in life sciences
21 November 2023 | London, UK

ELIXIR hCNV Community F2F/hybrid meeting
30 November-1 December 2023 | Hybrid - Hinxton, UK

RDM Community & Implementation Study Kick-off Meeting
4-6 December 2023 | Hybrid - Bergen, Norway

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
 

CarrerasLeaders postdoctoral fellowships in blood cancers

Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute (IJC)

International Relations Officer

ELIXIR

Research Community & Training Manager (SAE-023828)

The University of Manchester

Senior Research Software Engineer (Research Objects/FAIR Digital Objects) (SAE-023829)

The University of Manchester

Senior Research Software Engineer (Trusted Research Environments) (SAE-023829)

The University of Manchester