IFB 2105 call for proposals: developments of bioinformatics services for life sciences. 

The FIB is a national bioinformatics infrastructure that has been established in the framework of the "Investments for the Future" initiative.  Its basic mission is to provide core bioinformatics resources and services to the life science community. The FIB comprises 32 bioinformatics platforms that offer recognized services to this community. These services concern:

• The access to specialized databases with high-added value that are the product of the scientific expertise of the laboratory hosting the platform.
• The provision of tools and online services corresponding to the area of expertise of the laboratory hosting the platform, available in a form that is user-friendly (website, downloads) for human interactions or machine-friendly (web services) for programmatic access.
• The access to an IT infrastructure (computing, storage, access to public data collections, utilization of bioinformatics tools).
• The support for scientific projects and their hosting on the infrastructure.
• The training programs in bioinformatics.

This list is by no mean exhaustive and innovative projects not included in the above categories may be offered.

 

Any academic team that wishes to offer a service to the life science community can submit a project to the call. Teams with selected project that are not yet member of the FIB will be asked to join it (see Registration documents). The offered service must be maintained and made widely accessible to the life science community, for instance by being available on the FIB national computer infrastructure, when it is relevant.

The main criterion is the relevance and usefulness of the service for the life science community. The innovativeness of the service will also be taken into consideration. In case of a tie on the two above criteria, projects involving several teams and contributing to the structuring of the French bioinformatics community will be favored.

The selection process will be carried out in two stages.  In the first stage, the FIB steering committee will judge the relevance of the offered service. In a second stage, if the service meets the FIB eligibility criteria, the project will be forwarded to foreign reviewers (at least two per project) for evaluation (members list). The final project selection will be based on this evaluation.

The application form is available here .It must be written in English. The completed form must be uploaded on the project submission page which will be available once the 2016 projects call phase is released.

The FIB will provide funds to selected projects for recruiting an engineer in charge of developing the offered service (max. 2 years) and the corresponding engineer operation costs. The FIB will not allocate money for equipment in this call. If needed, the team will have access to the FIB national IT infrastructure (FIB's cloud).

The FIB web site lists the services offered by the current FIB platforms. There are two types of services, those with a scientific scope and those with a technological scope. The first ones concern the provision of data collections with high-added value or innovative tools and services based on the scientific expertise of the laboratory. Covered topics can be very varied: eukaryotic pathogens, viruses, regulation network, model organism databases, etc. The second ones aim to facilitate the accessibility and use of data, tools and IT infrastructures by the life science users. This concerns, for instance, methodologies to integrate heterogeneous data, to make tools and services better interoperable, to facilitate the creation of virtual machines of the FIB Cloud federation, etc