Final Recommendations for a Data and Model Management Framework. Data and Model Stewardship for the ISBE Infrastructure.

Stewardship of data, models, and processes produced within ISBE will be a vital crosscutting component of operations, and will ensure the availability, usability, longevity, and provenance of data and models. To do this ISBE must establish standardisation, curation and cataloguing tools and practices, to ensure that ISBE contributors and users can produce, retain, maintain and exchange data that is (re-)usable for ISBE modelling and interoperable with other Research Infrastructures.

The value of stewardship is universally recognised but often more in principle than action: some £3 billion of public money is invested annually in research in the UK alone, yet the research data resulting from this considerable investment are seldom as visible as they might be. The German Research Foundation (DFG) estimates that 80-90 % of all research data is never shared with other researchers. These results are never published in a scientific journal and often hidden in a drawer in the laboratories. Thus, a majority of research data is lost because of un-sustained storage and lack of sharing of these data. The preservation and sharing of digital materials so others can effectively reuse them maximises the impact of research inspires confidence among the research councils and funding bodies that invest in the work.

To systematically examine ISBE’s capability to support FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data, model and SOP management we devised: (a) a User and Sector Stakeholder Analysis; and (b) an Asset Management Capability Framework.

ISBE Research Infrastructure will be made up of distributed resources and services at two levels:

1. Specialist public archives managed for the international community by national or pan-national providers that are: (a) asset-specific datasets; (b) public tools; (c) catalogues of datasets and tools.  Providers may be aligned with nSBCs to contribute those resources/services to the ISBE Infrastructure or they may be part of another RI (e.g. ELIXIR) and their provision to the ISBE infrastructure contributed through MoUs and Service Level Agreements.
2. Project outcomes with locally deployable platforms and centralised resources to: support inherently integrated, cross-asset, cross-archive Systems Biology investigations; provide a unified Sys Bio Commons to the outcomes of European projects; and to in-the-field supported asset management in research projects, with publishing workflows into public archives and publisher repositories.