All the fun of the FAIR: status and prospects for research data management in Life Sciences

Over the past 5 years we have seen a change in expectations for the management of all the outcomes of research – that is the “assets” of data, models, codes, SOPs, computational methods and so forth. The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship (Findable, Assessable, Interoperable, Reusable) [1] has focused attention on research data management, influenced major funders' (NIH, H2020) mandates and is a pillar of the emerging European Open Science Cloud. I will explore the status and prospects for research data management in Life Sciences using two European based projects as case studies:

•             The FAIRDOM project (http://www.fair-dom.org) supports Systems Biology research projects across Europe.

•             ELIXIR (http:// http://www.elixir-europe.org/) is a European Research Infrastructure of 21 national nodes and a hub funded by national agreements to coordinate and sustain key data repositories for the Life Science community. 

[1] Wilkinson et al, The FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship Scientific Data 3, doi:10.1038/sdata.2016.18

Bio: Professor Carole Goble is based in the School of Computer Science, at the University of Manchester. Her current research interests are in reproducible research, asset curation and preservation, semantic interoperability, knowledge exchange between scientists and new models of scholarly communication. Professor Goble is Coordinator of the FAIRDOM project, data lead for the ISBE Research Infrastructure, Head of Node of ELIXIR-UK and co-leads the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform. She is a founder and PI of the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute. At the institutional level she chairs the University of Manchester’s Research Data Management User Group. At the policy level she serves on BBSRC Council and BBSRC’s Exploiting New Ways of Working Strategy Advisory Panel.