Challenges of Managing Research Data in Biomedicine... and Ways Forward

One of the greatest challenges for research in the digital age is FAIR data. Both researchers generating data and researchers searching for data encounter this problem every day. How can data be stored in a way that is findable, accessable, interoperable and reusable?

 

For those generating data, making it FAIR may be too complicated. But data that isn’t FAIR is easily lost in the flux of digital information, or difficult to apply to other research. Essentially data that isn’t FAIR calls into question the value of the research that generated it. What value is research when the results can’t be used for future advancement.

 

EUDAT and DICE are addressing these problems by making FAIR data easier for researchers. Take into account the Computational Biomedical research community. It is very diverse with various user groups in academia, industry, clinical activity and in the general public. The community is moving towards exascale in compute and research workflows which are very compute and data intensive. They face challenges in sharing and exchanging large data, publishing data and adhering to FAIR principles and handling and sharing sensitive data.

 

This is where EUDAT and DICE come in. The B2Services, specifically B2SAFE and B2SHARE, are being implemented in the CompBioMed community with technical support from EUDAT.

 

B2SAFE is a robust, safe and highly available service which allows community and departmental repositories to implement data management policies on their research data across multiple administrative domains in a trustworthy manner. It offers: abstraction layer of large scale, heterogeneous data storages, guards against data loss in long-term archiving, allows to optimize access for users (e.g. from different regions), brings data closer to facilities for compute-intensive analysis. For the communities who need to guard against data loss, B2SAFE is a customer-facing service that allows data replication and safe storage between geographically distributed centres in the EUDAT CDI.

 

B2SHARE is a user-friendly, reliable and trustworthy way for researchers, scientific communities and citizen scientists to store and share small-scale research data from diverse contexts. B2SHARE is a solution that facilitates research data storage, guarantees long-term persistence of data and allows data, results or ideas to be shared worldwide. Standard. For the individual researchers who do not have adequate facilities for storing, preserving and sharing data, B2SHARE Service is a customer-facing service which provides a safe repository for scientific data and an easy way to share it in the research community.

 

EUDAT and DICE also organise webinars and training to help the individual researchers learn the competencies needed to save and share data in a FAIR way.

 

You can find out more about CompBioMed and the B2Services in the upcoming webinar Using the DICE Services to move towards FAIR data in Computational Biomedical Research