Online-only workshop and hackathon on Nextflow and nf-core

Published on Thursday, 28 May 2020

QBiC and the DKFZ announce their co-organized workshop on 13th to 17th of July 2020. The workshop includes a Nextflow tutorial and a nf-core hackathon with tutorials. Both events will be held online-only.

In case you are interested in attending the Nextflow workshop please find more information and register under the following link:
https://indico.dkfz.de/event/225/

The Nextflow workshop is limited to 30 participants, so please only register if you plan to attend all sessions and follow the exercises. The sessions will also be live-streamed on YouTube, so it will be possible to follow the sessions via YouTube without previous registration.

To register for the nf-core tutorials and hackathon, and find out more information about the event, please follow this link:
https://nf-co.re/events/2020/hackathon-july-2020

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DataPLANT NFDI – recommendation for funding

Published on Tuesday, 19 May 2020

On 18th May 2020 we received the recommendation for funding of the DFGs NFDI panel of experts on the DataPLANT proposal. The BioDATEN Science Data Center is both involved in the role of fundamental plant researchers and in the role of service providers. In this decision, which has yet to be confirmed by the GWK (Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz) on 26th June 2020, DataPLANT was recommended for funding along with eight other consortia. For BioDATEN we are pleased that we have been able to successfully evolve our vision together with the other applicant institutions in the DataPLANT proposal. Further feedback on the proposal and the final decision is announced in August 2020 at the latest. As nine consortia are to be funded instead of the seven originally announced, it cannot yet be said whether this will have an impact on the planned budget. The planning will be accordingly cautious.

In order to advance the information of the community about the DataPLANT activities, there is now an initial website https://nfdi4plants.de/ available. Further, the DataPLANT speakers have set up a Twitter account @nfdi4plants. At the same time, the DataPLANT speakers have joined cross-cutting activities and are participating, for example, in the exchange on metadata in the NFDI at the beginning of July 2020.
The advice of the NFDI expert panel was based on the results of the evaluation and the comments of the applicants on the evaluation results. In order to be able to adequately evaluate the applications reviewed in seven expert colloquia, the NFDI expert panel also paid special attention to the framework for setting up the NFDI in a scientifically guided procedure.

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BioDATEN participating in the state wide RDM WG meeting (12.05.)

Published on Friday, 15 May 2020

Representatives of the Science Data Center BioDATEN took part in the RDM Working Group (AK FDM) online meeting on 12th May 2020 and contributed to the discussion both on quality assurance and governance of research data.
The long-term character of research data and the various parties involved in the process create new challenges in research organisations with a high level of fluctuation in personnel. The researchers who created, collected and processed data may have left the research institution and projects were officially completed long ago. Many projects are also confronted with questions regarding copyright, handling of personal data and appropriate licenses for research data. Responsibility for the data must therefore be exercised in a regulated manner at any point in the data lifecycle by appropriate entities. After using service providers for storing and processing data during the project period, other entities can get involved after the project ends like subject-specific repositories or university publication services such as dark archives. The potentially perpetual storage of data after project completion is accompanied by responsibilities whose assignment should be clarified. Part of the handling can be derived from data management plans, other parts could be defined in research data policies of the scientific institution.

Research data management also affects aspects of good scientific practice. With the objective of achieving the greatest possible transparency and openness while at the same time considering the prudent handling of sensitive data, this requires clear regulations and agreements. For example, questions of copyright and the handling of personal data should already be clarified at the start of a research project or project in general. The same goes for the granting of suitable licenses for research data taken over by storage facilities, like repositories or dark archives, or data generated by researchers.
BioDATEN as a science data center should therefore help it's community by suggesting guidelines and promote their implementation. These include the question of data release and regulations comparable to publication contracts with the University Library. Increasingly, an (institutionalised) RDM is becoming a prerequisite for the approval of grants for new research projects. In order to ensure that this does not remain a one-sided process, both individual researchers and the research institutions and its entities, such as research groups, institutes or CRCs, must be included in the governance considerations for the RDM.

In the following, a document with guidelines for practical aspects of the RDM will be compiled for individual professorships and individual working groups as well as for larger collaborative projects. These should contain clear regulations on costs and responsibility including the assignment of rights to the storage facility in cases such as data migration and deletion. Early planning is facilitated by filling out Data Management Plans. This makes it possible to plan costs and expenses for the infrastructure providers involved.

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