The BeYond-COVID project (BY-COVID) aims to make COVID-19 data accessible to scientists in laboratories and anyone who can use it, such as medical staff in hospitals or government officials. Pursuing the goal of going beyond SARS-CoV-2 data, the project will serve as the groundwork to make data from other infectious diseases open and accessible to everyone. The BY-COVID project strives to simplify data access and reuse through four key ‘pillars’:

1. Mobilise data: ensuring raw sequencing data from across the world can be easily submitted to core data hubs (e.g. SARS-CoV-2 Data Hubs, European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), Federated European Genome Archive (FEGA), CESSDA social science archives, and BBMRI biobank directory).
2. Connect data: build the technical capacity to link sequence data and metadata – expanding beyond scientific and medical data to broader metadata from public health and economics, for example. Support integration to the COVID-19 Data Portal.
3. Standardise data: provide recommended data management protocols to encourage Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data standards and resource interoperability.
4. Expose and analyse data: support exposure and analysis of FAIR data on infectious diseases, such as the regular VEO reports on mutations and variation in publicly shared SARS-CoV-2 data and the open COVID-19 Galaxy analysis platform).

BY-COVID is an exciting interdisciplinary project that unites life science, medical, policy, social science and public health experts across Europe. Led by ELIXIR, the project has 53 partners from 20 European countries. The BY-COVID project will run for three years and is part of the European Commission’s HERA Incubator plan, Anticipating together the threat of COVID-19 variants.

ELIXIR-UK involvement

WP3, 4: FAIRsharing-OpenAIRE Data Discovery, RDMkit, FAIR Cookbook, RO-Crate, WorkflowHub Manchester, Oxford, Nottingham (as BBMRI-ERIC)