We’re investing £34m in BioFAIR, a concept that could transform how we facilitate research data management.
"Digital research infrastructure has fast become as critical to UK bioscience as physical infrastructure. The BioFAIR project will provide the backbone for ground-breaking research, enabling researchers to tackle key societal challenges head-on."
~ Dr Sarah Perkins, Executive Director for Strategic Planning, Evidence and Engagement at BBSRC and the UKRI Senior Responsible Officer for BioFAIR
With a mission to transform the UK’s digital research infrastructure, BioFAIR is a concept which is set to future-proof the UK life sciences ecosystem with cohesive and collaborative partnership.
In building a national platform, BioFAIR will leverage established best practices and capabilities, accelerate the adoption of findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data principles across the UK life sciences. This will also:
• Unify the UK’s currently fragmented digital research landscape
• Break down barriers to democratise data accessibility
• Coordinate and deliver extensive training and support for practitioners at all levels
Inspired by a proposal from ELIXIR-UK community and supported by BBSRC and Medical Research Council, this funder-community partnership will bridge gaps between researchers, digital research technical professionals and existing institutional digital research infrastructures.
Over the course of the five year project, four key capabilities will underpin the project mission:
💠 Data commons will catalogue sources of existing datasets, making them easily accessible to life science researchers.
💠 Method commons will enable the collaborative use of shared computational workflows with a national workflow capability.
💠 The community centre will provide a focal point for sharing expertise, best practice and troubleshooting within disciplines.
💠 The knowledge centre will enable those driving the collection and curation of existing knowledge resources and training materials to advance best practice in research data management.
Read more about BioFair in the news section of our website.