EOSC-Life

EOSC-Life
Name	EOSC-Life
Type	Research infrastructure consortium
Established	2018
Region	European Union
Headquarters	Netherlands
Members	Multiple European life-science research institutes and infrastructures

EOSC-Life is a European research consortium that coordinated life-science data, services, and infrastructures to integrate with the European Open Science Cloud. It brought together biological research infrastructures and institutions to address interoperability, data stewardship, and access across biomedical, genomics, and environmental life-science domains. The project aligned stakeholders from funded initiatives, policy bodies, and scientific facilities to deliver tools, standards, and training for cross-domain data reuse.

Overview

EOSC-Life operated at the intersection of multiple European research initiatives such as European Commission programmes, Horizon 2020 projects, and pan-European infrastructures. It linked major life-science infrastructures including ELIXIR, Euro-BioImaging, BBMRI-ERIC, EU-OPENSCREEN, and INSTRUCT-ERIC alongside research infrastructures like CERN-connected data projects and national nodes such as ELIXIR-UK and ELIXIR-NL. The consortium worked with policy actors including European Research Council and standardization bodies such as European Committee for Standardization to align with FAIR principles promoted by groups like RDA and GO FAIR. Collaboration extended to projects funded under Horizon Europe, coordination activities with G7 science working groups, and partnerships with major research centers including Max Planck Society, CNRS, and Karolinska Institutet.

Objectives and Scope

Key objectives included enabling cross-infrastructure interoperability, promoting open data access, and implementing FAIR data stewardship across life sciences. EOSC-Life targeted integration of data produced by facilities such as European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Institut Pasteur, and regional infrastructures like Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and INSERM. Scope covered domains from genomics and proteomics to imaging and metabolomics, coordinating with domain-specific initiatives including Human Cell Atlas, ENCODE Project, ProteomeXchange, MetaboLights, and Neuroinformatics Platform. The project aimed to harmonize metadata standards used by repositories like ArrayExpress, ENA, PRIDE, and clinical resources associated with European Medicines Agency-related studies.

Consortium and Governance

The consortium governance model involved partner institutions, national nodes, and advisory boards with representation from research infrastructures such as ELIXIR-CONVERGE, Infrastructure for Systems Biology Europe, and national research organizations like Science Europe. Governance engaged stakeholders from funding agencies including European Research Area Committee, philanthropic funders like Wellcome Trust, and regulatory agencies such as European Agency for the Evaluation of Medicinal Products (historical context). Advisory and technical boards included experts affiliated with universities like University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, Uppsala University, KU Leuven, and research institutes like European Bioinformatics Institute. Management structures coordinated with projects such as EOSC-Hub, EOSCsecretariat.eu, and OpenAIRE to align procedures, legal frameworks, and service level agreements.

Services and Infrastructure

EOSC-Life worked to connect life-science services with the EOSC ecosystem, integrating computational platforms like Galaxy Project, Nextflow, and cloud providers referenced by initiatives such as GEANT. It focused on enabling workflows for resources hosted by European Nucleotide Archive, UniProt, Proteomics Identifications Database, and imaging repositories affiliated with Euro-BioImaging. Infrastructure workstreams interfaced with high-performance computing centers like PRACE, cloud infrastructures promoted by EUDAT, and data management services in collaboration with ELIXIR-CONVERGE nodes. Tools and standards embraced by the project included DataCite identifiers, ORCID for researcher attribution, and persistent identifier frameworks used by Crossref and catalogues maintained by FAIRsharing.

Projects and Deliverables

Deliverables comprised guidelines, reference implementations, and demonstrators for interoperable life-science data services. Technical outputs included workflow containers based on Docker and Singularity, training materials coordinated with ELIXIR Training Platform, and metadata schemas aligned with initiatives like MIAME and MIAPE. Pilot projects showcased integration use cases with datasets from 1000 Genomes Project, The Cancer Genome Atlas, and large-scale imaging studies from facilities such as European XFEL and European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. Community tools and catalogues were developed in concert with repositories such as Zenodo, indexation efforts by World Data System, and annotation resources like Gene Ontology and Reactome.

Impact and Community Engagement

EOSC-Life engaged research communities through workshops, hackathons, and training schools in partnership with organizations including ELIXIR Nodes, European Molecular Biology Laboratory training programs, and regional networks like Nordic EMBL Partnership. The project influenced policy discussions at venues such as European Research Area meetings and contributed technical input to standardization efforts led by ISO. It fostered synergies with consortia such as GA4GH, BioMed Alliance, and ECOSTAT-type initiatives to accelerate open science in life sciences. Long-term impacts included increased adoption of interoperable standards across databases hosted by institutions like EMBL-EBI, enhanced reproducibility in multi-omics studies performed at centers like Wellcome Sanger Institute, and strengthened connections between EOSC services and national infrastructures exemplified by ELIXIR-IT and ELIXIR-SE.

Category:European research projects