FAIRsharing announced as one of success stories of EC BY-COVID project

The BY-COVID project was launched in autumn 2021, as part of the European Commission’s HERA incubator plan ‘Anticipating together the threat of COVID-19 variants’. The aim was to consolidate solutions, often rapidly assembled during the COVID-19 pandemic, to support the continuing response to COVID-19 and preparedness for future infectious disease outbreaks.

The project has now announced FAIRsharing as one of 16 success stories, under the ‘Connecting, standardising and exposing data’ theme. FAIRsharing is a curated, informative and educational resource on data and metadata standards, led by the Data Readiness Group at the Oxford e-Research Centre.

One of the challenges for pathogen research needed to combat a pandemic is the availability of data from clinical trials, biobanks, behavioural and socioeconomic studies. These data are scattered across many databases, often structured according to different standards, and tends to be difficult to discover, access and integrate. FAIRsharing has enabled discoverability of and facilitated access to heterogeneous, yet interlinked and organised data, building a digital space for infectious disease data.

FAIRsharing is a cross-disciplinary resource that maps and interlinks databases, standards and policies, and supports their discoverability in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The BY-COVID FAIRsharing Collection, with over 70 data sources, provides an at-a-glance view of the scope and the characteristics of each database (e.g. what type of digital objects and for which discipline; the data access restrictions), their relationships (e.g. if they exchange data), and the type of standards implemented (e.g. types of identifiers, models and terminology).

Allyson Lister, Knowledge Engineer on the FAIRsharing project, says, "BY-COVID has given us the opportunity to create a close collaboration between FAIRsharing and the European COVID-19 Data Platform, enabling improved discoverability of and facilitated access to 70 heterogeneous data sources including socioeconomic data, health and clinical data, images, genomic and phenotypic data and chemical biology, along with the standards used to describe the data." 

Find out more about FAIRsharing and the other BY-COVID success stories on the BY-COVID project website.