ELIXIR is committed to enabling its Member States to integrate life sciences data and services and to maximise the expertise of each in bioinformatics. To this end, Europe's national centres, services and core bioinformatics resources are being brought together into a single coordinated infrastructure and creating a community of computer scientists across Europe.
So far, this has resulted in a powerful environment supporting the European contribution to the development of generic standards and tools for the life sciences community: Bioschema, EDMA, FAIR (a set of standards and tools for the standardisation of plant phenotyping data, workflows and containers, etc). It provides an organised European voice in international consortia (e.g. Breeding API, MIAPPE and GA4GH, in which ELIXIR-EN has been very active) and a strong contribution to the development of sustainable data analysis environments (BioTools, Galaxy.eu, etc.) and provides capacity building and training throughout Europe.
ELIXIR supports co-development activities through internal projects between its nodes. In the period 2015-2018, ELIXIR-FR participated in 19 Implementation Studies (IS), staff exchanges and hackathons. The last one was organized in France (Paris, November 2018) and 150 experts and computer scientists/engineers from ELIXIR nodes but also, and this was unprecedented, from the private sector, were hosted for a week to develop codes together or "FAIR" their resources. The infrastructure also allows its members to participate in structuring European projects, such as the H2020 (2019-2023) EUCANcan project, which aims to align and interconnect existing European and Canadian infrastructures for the analysis and management of genomic data in oncology. The H2020 GenRes Coordination and Support Action is an opportunity to position the role of ELIXIR in the field of biodiversity. ELIXIR is a real opportunity for the IFB to align itself with the objectives of the European Open Scientific Cloud (EOSC).
Over the last five years, ELIXIR has supported coordination with other ESFRIs, in particular through its communities (e.g. EMPHASIS and ELIXIR, where the French node has been at the initiative), which has also been useful internally to better define the aspects of e-infrastructure to be shared and the specific aspects. It was also useful to ensure that the key objects allow interoperability between the phenotyping data produced by EMPHASIS and the polymorphism data (stored in the ELIXIR archives at EMBL-EBI). Another example is the ELIXIR marine metagenomics community, which works closely with the EMBRC Eric in several areas: promotion of the best strategy in terms of e-infrastructure, data management and NATO plans and analysis flows in relation to genomics observatory projects. In the coming period, collaborations with other ESFRIs in the field of life sciences will be supported by the H2020 EOSC-Life project, coordinated by ELIXIR Hub. The French node is involved in activities such as ECRAN, MIRRI, EMBRC and EMPHASIS.
