Celebrating 3 years of BY-COVID project
October 2, 2024
BY-COVID
FAIR
It has already been three years since the BY-COVID project kicked off in October 2021. Now that the project wrapped up in September 2024, let's take a moment today to look back at what we've achieved over the past three years and celebrate the successful outcomes of the project.
As the world continued to face the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, it was crucial to take a step back and assess how we handled the initial crisis, as well as how we could improve our ongoing response to this and to future pandemics. The BY-COVID project was set up to learn from the technical gaps that hindered the ability to investigate SARS-CoV-2 in the early stages of the pandemic. It brought together and coordinated dispersed datasets from different sources, as well as developed resources, data standards and guidelines to enable a rapid response to novel emerging threads.
In an exceptional and one-of-a-kind interdisciplinary collaboration, BY-COVID has brought together 53 partners from 19 countries and stakeholders from the biomedical field, hospitals, public health, social sciences and humanities.
As such, BY-COVID is an excellent example of successful interdisciplinary work across country borders. The results of the project give scientists from different fields, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and industry, access to a wide range of data they can use to gain new insights into infectious diseases.
Wrapping up the project
We concluded the project with a final general assembly meeting on 10 September 2024 in Brussels, Belgium. This final meeting included presentations of the activities and outputs of each work package and discussions on the sustainability of the results. We are very delighted that Euro-BioImaging's work on data mobilisation and recognition of data stewardship was featured in the BY-COVID success story brochure that was made available to the world at the event.
On 11 September followed an outreach event aimed at industrial and policy partners under the theme 'From open data to knowledge: enhancing European resilience to health crises.' We presented and discussed topics ranging from industry's experience in dealing with a pandemic to open science in the context of pandemic preparedness.
What did we achieve?
All in all BY-COVID was a great success and brought many useful outcomes, both for the scientific community as well as for the general public. We are grateful for all contributions from the over 450 members of the BY-COVID consortium and we look forward to organisations also outside the consortium using, contributing to and maintaining the data ecosystem created by BY-COVID. The established resources and pipelines may serve as a demonstrator for other major challenges that require access to distributed data such as biodiversity and food security.
'BY-COVID was a great opportunity to build stronger connections with other research infrastructures and project partners who are particularly involved with Euro-BioImaging's data services. These connections will enhance the quality of our data services.'
Aastha Mathur - Head of Image Data Services at Euro-BioImaging
From Euro-BioImaging's perspective, we consider BY-COVID to be truly transformative, as the project has allowed to introduce and establish a Euro-BioImaging Data Steward position as the driving force behind the data-related BY-COVID outputs. In this way, BY-COVID helped to showcase the work of data stewards as a whole and to highlight the importance of their recognition. Another outcome has been to strengthen Euro-BioImaging's relationships and interactions with other research infrastructures and to build a sense of community through the project. We are proud to present below some of the BY-COVID results from Euro-BioImaging:
Made possible through our data steward, we have contributed to BY-COVID's key objective of making infectious disease data available by mobilising several image datasets into open bioimage repositories, while creating a rapid and straightforward pipeline for data deposition along the way.
One of the critical aspects of data sharing is data deposition, which is often not as straightforward as it needs to be for rapid data exchange. We have therefore created a step-by-step process for depositing bioimage data in the BioImage Archive.
In order to improve the FAIRness of the bio-imaging data produced, and thus increase the amount of usable data in the open science domain, our data steward conducted several one-on-one FAIR data consultations with scientists and held two open workshops on FAIR bioimage data.
To improve data management, we created a template for creating data management plans for scientific bioimaging projects.
We contributed to the domain-specific use case “Mechanistic analysis via the COVID19 disease map” aimed to investigate molecular mechanisms of SARS-CoV-2 by co-developing two visualisation plugins for bioimage data on the COVID-19 disease map.
In line with the project's objective of close collaboration with the ISIDORe project, we are showcasing one Euro-BioImaging ISIDORe projects on the Infectious Diseases Toolkit, a resource created in BY-COVID that provides advice on how to work with infectious diseases data.
BY-COVID has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement number 101046203.
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