Euro-BioImaging supports the Lund Declaration on ‘Maximising the Benefits of Research Data’

On June 19-20, 2023. European leaders and Research Infrastructure directors met in Lund, Sweden, for a high-level conference on “The Potential of Research Data: How Research Infrastructures Provide New Opportunities and Benefits for Society.” This conference, initiated by the Swedish presidency of the EU, explored the opportunities and challenges linked to collaboration on open data and highlighted the essential role of research infrastructures in the digital era. It culminated in the publication of the Lund Declaration, a document which places the responsibility to promote FAIR data generation and sharing to improve Europe’s competitiveness on the shoulders of research infrastructures like Euro-BioImaging ERIC.

FAIR image data is a valuable resource for the scientific community. It not only ensures rigorous and reproducible science, but holds the potential to enable novel scientific discoveries and promote development of advanced analysis methods. At Euro-BioImaging ERIC, we support development of an ecosystem of FAIR image data and tools together with an active imaging community. One of our key missions is to inspire and support researchers to work towards making image data FAIR. At this crucial moment when the link between FAIR data and improved EU research & innovation outputs is recognized in the Lund Declaration, Euro-BioImaging has authored an article, Building a FAIR image data ecosystem for microscopy communities, in the journal Histological and Cell Biology (HCB) aiming to capture the imaging community’s position in this journey towards FAIR data.

This article, written by Euro-BioImaging ERIC Hub team members, reflects upon the microscopy community’s journey towards FAIR data and contains a number of practical recommendations for community tools & standards that can be used by researchers to transform their image data into a global resource and effectively extend the data lifetime beyond a single publication. This article is part of a larger “In Focus” special edition of HCB on “Data Management and Data Analysis in Microscopy”, conceptualized in-part by Euro-BioImaging Node NL-BioImaging, with inputs from various image data resources and community initiatives.

Euro-BioImaging ERIC provides coordination and policy support, as well as guidelines, tools, and direct support for producing FAIR image data and making it openly available. Our data services for the imaging community at large are supported by many data-centric European projects including those related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

At the Lund conference, Euro-Bioimaging ERIC was represented by Director General, John Eriksson, who participated in a round table about “How to increase impact in industry - What are the major opportunities and challenges of sharing data?”. Antje Keppler, Bio-Hub Director, was present in her role as Chair of ERIC Forum.

We are very excited to continue our work together with the imaging community to ensure that valuable microscopy, preclinical and medical imaging datasets are made FAIR and shared responsibly. The Lund Declaration reinforces our mandate as a research infrastructure to work towards this goal and we appreciate the renewed support for our actions in this domain.

Learn more about the Lund Conference and watch the live streams:

Lund Conference live stream & webpage

Read the Lund Declaration on Maximizing the Benefits of Research Data

Read our peer-reviewed article: Building a FAIR image data ecosystem for microscopy communities

Watch videos in our FAIR BioImaging Data playlist in this YouTube playlist.

About Euro-BioImaging

Euro-BioImaging ERIC is a distributed research infrastructure that offers open access to excellent biological and biomedical imaging technologies, training and data services. It provides access to over 100 imaging technologies that are offered through 35 Nodes comprising 173 renowned imaging facilities. Euro-BioImaging ERIC - in addition to its imaging technology services - provides access to Image Data Services, which include coordinating user access for data services through Nodes, participation in European projects, community engagement, support for technical developments and image data stewardship.