Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BY-COVID (Beyond COVID)
Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-03-31
As seen during the COVID-19 pandemic, and other infectious disease outbreaks, researchers, healthcare professionals and citizens need to store, share, access, analyse, link and process research and clinical data and data analysis workflows across disciplines and national borders in a coordinated response.
Boosting FAIR and open data sharing in support for European preparedness for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, BY-COVID works to:
Enable researchers, healthcare professionals and citizens fighting the spread of infectious diseases to store, document, share, access, analyse, link and process research and clinical data across disciplines and national borders;
Federate research and clinical data (human and viral) through national and international centres, so as to enable pan-European and global sharing and hence research advances for better preparedness;
develop the necessary digital tools and data analytics, including for the identification and tracking of variants of concern, in support of public health action;
To improve linkages of FAIR data (and associated metadata) on pathogens, on their diseases and on their socio-economic consequences, considering a range of research fields, such as omics, clinical, and epidemiological research, social sciences & humanities, so as to take a holistic approach to preparedness and response.
The BY-COVID project will also work to ensure that the above efforts are usefully contributing to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Partnership and the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
Boosting FAIR and open data sharing in support for European preparedness for COVID-19 and other infectious diseases, BY-COVID works to:
Enable researchers, healthcare professionals and citizens fighting the spread of infectious diseases to store, document, share, access, analyse, link and process research and clinical data across disciplines and national borders;
Federate research and clinical data (human and viral) through national and international centres, so as to enable pan-European and global sharing and hence research advances for better preparedness;
develop the necessary digital tools and data analytics, including for the identification and tracking of variants of concern, in support of public health action;
To improve linkages of FAIR data (and associated metadata) on pathogens, on their diseases and on their socio-economic consequences, considering a range of research fields, such as omics, clinical, and epidemiological research, social sciences & humanities, so as to take a holistic approach to preparedness and response.
The BY-COVID project will also work to ensure that the above efforts are usefully contributing to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Partnership and the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the importance of Open Science - from understanding the genetic basis of the virus and monitoring new mutations to tracking the spread of the disease across populations, open data has played a critical role in enabling new scientific knowledge and facilitating public health interventions.
The BY-COVID project is one of the Horizon Europe projects that supports the operation of the European COVID-19 Data Platform, a critical resource providing access to open literature and data on both the virus and the disease, enabling researchers in their efforts towards e.g. viral characterisation, the development of vaccines and treatments, and variant analysis. The COVID-19 Data Portal, a component of the Platform, contains 16.9 million viral sequences and 950 000 open scientific articles related to COVID-19. The Portal has also been deployed to support the more recent mpox outbreak and is now forming part of the pandemic preparedness toolkit to address future pathogen outbreaks. The Portal has proved to be incredibly popular with researchers across the globe.
There are a great number of national and EU-funded research projects relating to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, each generating new knowledge and valuable data that must be publicly available and reused. BY-COVID provides the infrastructure that allows this to happen in the long-term. An indexing system has been developed as part of the project, allowing over 400 social science records to be accessible through the European COVID-19 Data Platform. This includes data that assess the impact of the pandemic on school education through public perceptions and acceptance of lockdown rules. This is a major achievement of the project, as well as a concrete implementation, through European funding, of a cross-cutting. The BY-COVID project continues to index further data resources to support interdisciplinary research.
Project participants have collaboratively developed a new resource - the Infectious Disease Toolkit - which helps scientists find the specific tools and guidelines they need for storing, sharing, accessing, analysing, linking and processing infectious disease data, allowing them to respond quickly to future disease outbreaks.
Fostering long-term sustainability and wide uptake of its results, BY-COVID works on integrating them into EOSC and the EHDS, via targeted engagement, collaboration and communication mechanisms. BY-COVID also makes use of, and further develops, EOSC tools and resources e.g. those developed through the EOSC-Life project. The BY-COVID project provides a framework and technologies such as FAIRsharing, RO-Crate & Workflow-Hub, for making data from other infectious diseases open and accessible to everyone.
The BY-COVID project is one of the Horizon Europe projects that supports the operation of the European COVID-19 Data Platform, a critical resource providing access to open literature and data on both the virus and the disease, enabling researchers in their efforts towards e.g. viral characterisation, the development of vaccines and treatments, and variant analysis. The COVID-19 Data Portal, a component of the Platform, contains 16.9 million viral sequences and 950 000 open scientific articles related to COVID-19. The Portal has also been deployed to support the more recent mpox outbreak and is now forming part of the pandemic preparedness toolkit to address future pathogen outbreaks. The Portal has proved to be incredibly popular with researchers across the globe.
There are a great number of national and EU-funded research projects relating to SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, each generating new knowledge and valuable data that must be publicly available and reused. BY-COVID provides the infrastructure that allows this to happen in the long-term. An indexing system has been developed as part of the project, allowing over 400 social science records to be accessible through the European COVID-19 Data Platform. This includes data that assess the impact of the pandemic on school education through public perceptions and acceptance of lockdown rules. This is a major achievement of the project, as well as a concrete implementation, through European funding, of a cross-cutting. The BY-COVID project continues to index further data resources to support interdisciplinary research.
Project participants have collaboratively developed a new resource - the Infectious Disease Toolkit - which helps scientists find the specific tools and guidelines they need for storing, sharing, accessing, analysing, linking and processing infectious disease data, allowing them to respond quickly to future disease outbreaks.
Fostering long-term sustainability and wide uptake of its results, BY-COVID works on integrating them into EOSC and the EHDS, via targeted engagement, collaboration and communication mechanisms. BY-COVID also makes use of, and further develops, EOSC tools and resources e.g. those developed through the EOSC-Life project. The BY-COVID project provides a framework and technologies such as FAIRsharing, RO-Crate & Workflow-Hub, for making data from other infectious diseases open and accessible to everyone.
Accelerating Open Data for European preparedness for infectious diseases, here we showcase our results beyond the state of the art.
The collaboration across domains within the BY-COVID project, particularly involving social science perspectives, allows for access to valuable insights into human behaviour, vulnerable populations, and the impact of different policies. This inclusive approach contributes to enhancing public health communication. By incorporating these insights into policymaking, there is an opportunity to develop more effective strategies for preventing and controlling infectious diseases.
BY-COVID joined forces with the ISIDORe project, accelerating Research infrastructure services for rapid research responses to COVID-19 and other infectious disease epidemics. By expanding the resources made available to users and their access to cutting-edge services, the ISIDORe project intends to demonstrate that a dedicated integrated epidemic disease research infrastructure service can significantly impact the infectious diseases research landscape. And should ultimately become a permanent capacity embedded in the EU’s overarching strategy for pandemic preparedness and crisis management. BY-COVID and ISIDORe share a number of partnersing RIs, making the dataflows from ISIDORe Transnational Access projects into COVID-19 DataPortal a reality. In addition, the collaboration resulted in the Umbrella Data Management Plans to integrate FAIR data: lessons from the ISIDORe and BY-COVID consortia for pandemic preparedness.
Engage with the EOSC Partnership and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), via its dedicated task BY-COVID has worked to create and strengthen communication channels so that research infrastructures can convey EOSC-related input to the EOSC Partnership as well as align with its already established standards. BY-COVID constantly searches for synergies with the ongoing shaping of the EHDS concept. Partners studied its Regulation Proposal (May 2022), looking at its provisions on primary and secondary use and on the EHDS governance structure, we studied references to infectious diseases, COVID-19 and provision on processing of health data for secondary use.
The collaboration across domains within the BY-COVID project, particularly involving social science perspectives, allows for access to valuable insights into human behaviour, vulnerable populations, and the impact of different policies. This inclusive approach contributes to enhancing public health communication. By incorporating these insights into policymaking, there is an opportunity to develop more effective strategies for preventing and controlling infectious diseases.
BY-COVID joined forces with the ISIDORe project, accelerating Research infrastructure services for rapid research responses to COVID-19 and other infectious disease epidemics. By expanding the resources made available to users and their access to cutting-edge services, the ISIDORe project intends to demonstrate that a dedicated integrated epidemic disease research infrastructure service can significantly impact the infectious diseases research landscape. And should ultimately become a permanent capacity embedded in the EU’s overarching strategy for pandemic preparedness and crisis management. BY-COVID and ISIDORe share a number of partnersing RIs, making the dataflows from ISIDORe Transnational Access projects into COVID-19 DataPortal a reality. In addition, the collaboration resulted in the Umbrella Data Management Plans to integrate FAIR data: lessons from the ISIDORe and BY-COVID consortia for pandemic preparedness.
Engage with the EOSC Partnership and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), via its dedicated task BY-COVID has worked to create and strengthen communication channels so that research infrastructures can convey EOSC-related input to the EOSC Partnership as well as align with its already established standards. BY-COVID constantly searches for synergies with the ongoing shaping of the EHDS concept. Partners studied its Regulation Proposal (May 2022), looking at its provisions on primary and secondary use and on the EHDS governance structure, we studied references to infectious diseases, COVID-19 and provision on processing of health data for secondary use.