BY-COVID Policy Brief: Open data to support European pandemic preparedness

16 May 2023

The BY-COVID project has published a policy brief summarising learnings and policy recommendations to support pandemic preparedness.

Six key takeaways have been identified for policymakers:

Place open data at the heart of national pandemic preparedness plans (aligned with the ERA vs Corona Action Plan)
Encourage consortia and projects generating data to deposit their data in the public domain, through research infrastructures and databases such as the European COVID-19 Data Platform
Provide adequate support for national data hubs and other infrastructure at the local level
Ensure investments across life sciences domains to maintain and reuse community-driven knowledge sharing platforms to inform future projects and foster links with research infrastructure facilities
Enable research infrastructure led investments in technologies and their on-going adaptation to specific requirements for making infectious diseases data open and accessible to everyone
Provide adequate training to foster the adoption of dedicated research tools (e.g. WorkFlowHub, RoCrate, FAIRsharing), data sharing practices, and FAIR and metadata creation.

The full policy brief can be accessed on Zenodo.

Contact: Marieke Willems, by-covid-admin@elixir-europe.org