Kick off of BY-COVID

October 13th marks the launch of BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) a new Horizon Europe funded project. This new project aims to tackle the data challenges that can hinder the effective pandemic response. The main goal of the project is to ensure that data on SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases can be found and used by everyone.

BY-COVID will build and expand upon the successful COVID-19 Data Platform, a resource initiated in the early stages of the pandemic, and looks to include data from a broader range of disciplines (from clinical research to social sciences and humanities). The project looks to simplify data access and reuse through three main actions: mobilising data, connecting & exposing data and ensuring FAIRness in the use & analysis of data.

ECRIN is involved in BY-COVID WP2 “Accessing heterogeneous data across domains and jurisdictions for enabling the downstream processing of COVID-19 and future pandemic episodes data” through the use and expansion of the COVID-19 clinical research data repository and the Clinical Research Metadata Repository, in WP3 “COVID-19 integration platform” with contributions to metadata interoperability across different domains and in WP5 “A continuously evolving demonstrator project feeding the changing research questions that surface during an on-going pandemic to solutions” by building strong links with the VACCELERATE network and enabling the sharing of data and samples.