At the initiation of the EOSC-Life project, consortium members issued the following statement:
Throughout the project, scientists have been invited to engage with EOSC-Life via our Digital Life Sciences Open Call, Trainings, News & Events.
Although the project has officially ended, we invite you to browse our Achievements to take advantage of the project outputs which are available to all European life science researchers, regardless of their home institutions.
EOSC-Life has made a lasting impact by connecting data, tools, clouds, and people across geographic boundaries, resulting in the creation of an open collaborative digital space for digital biology. As a unique achievement, this space represented a step change in data-driven life science for Europe.
Through the European Open Science Cloud, scientists in industry and academia can now access data hosted on advanced technology platforms by using the services, tools, workflows, and resources provided by EOSC-Life. These allow data integration across disciplines and geographical barriers. The success of this project means that good ideas and excellent science are no longer be limited by the individual scientist’s local access to leading facilities.
At the level of individual Member States, EOSC-Life provided substantial added value. By developing pan-European standards, services, and training programmes, EOSC-Life supported the integration of national capabilities and increased confidence in the synergy and sustainability of investments.
These endeavours were supported throughout the project by the broad geographic involvement of national expert centres (i.e. research infrastructure nodes) in EOSC-Life. Access to advanced life science infrastructures is a key objective of the Smart Specialisation Strategies being applied in many European regions. These efforts have received direct support from the implementation of Europe-wide standards through EOSC-Life and – through our established partnerships – were effectively linked to ongoing global efforts such as MIAPPE, NIH Data Commons, GA4GH, and RDA).
The project helped to remove legal and administrative barriers that hinder human research data sharing across geographical and organisational boundaries while preserving the trust of research participants. This work paved the way for continent-scale cohorts in life science research. As sensitive data sharing and joint analysis efforts have been severely limited due to various restrictions associated with different classes of sensitive data, this represents a significant innovation. EOSC-Life has helped place Biomedical and Medical Research Infrastructures (BMS RIs) in a position to provide guidance that lowers barriers that block biomedical and health research projects in a GDPR-regulated environment.
While this project did not overcome all the challenges associated with cross-border human data sharing, its establishment of a common framework for sharing translational research, biobanking, and clinical trial data represents a critical step towards the creation of truly pan-European cohorts – enabling Europe to take a leading role in personalised medicine.
Just as the discipline of bioinformatics emerged as a result of increased access to biological sequence and structure data, our goal was to foster new data-science disciplines based on access to biomolecular data, biological images, and rich phenotypic assays. The open calls provided throughout the project attracted leading European scientists, and the rigorous peer-review of these applications drove the establishment of internationally competitive projects.
EOSC-Life did not merely result in a collection of data resources; the project also traced the research impact and industrial use of these data. By shaping EOSC to meet the needs of the life science community, the project provided a unique opportunity for scientists to access and integrate an unprecedented richness of data resources. By using common metadata specifications, cataloguing, and indexing in data catalogues, BMS RI datasets have become widely accessible across disciplines.
Thus, by providing broad access to life science data and tools, EOSC-Life has successfully supported world-class interdisciplinary research and directly benefited many sectors of society.