CORBEL Final report common infrastructures and services

Cutting edge life science research in Europe is carried out by scientists funded nationally, through European coordination programmes (JPI, ERA-NET), and through large public-private partnerships such as IMI. To be truly transformative the life science research infrastructures need to effectively interface with the scientists and projects within these large and diverse user communities as well as the bodies responsible for organising the funding calls.

The project CORBEL is a four-year Research and Innovation Action funded in 2015 by the European Commission to establish a framework of shared services between the ESFRI Life Science (LS RI).

The core purpose of CORBEL is to drive LS RI interoperability, the project aims to operationalise the interfaces, access protocols, data management, and ELSI support so that users can seamlessly access the rich landscape of European biological and medical research infrastructure services. CORBEL enables the LS RIs to support users throughout the execution of a scientific project: from planning and grant applications through to the long-term sustainable management and exploitation of research data. This deliverable summarises the common infrastructure and services established between the Life Science RI within CORBEL together with sustainability plans for the assets produced:

• CORBEL has delivered a set of common services and policies for data, innovation and user access that will underpin the interconnection of the life science RIs. These services, e.g. the joint login service (Life Science AAI) and user access tool (ARIA) will be taken forward through EOSC-Life.
• The user projects supported within CORBEL as cross-RI access pathways have been very successful. A set of bilateral agreements between RIs have been developed to capture the learning and facilitate future cross-RI service provision. The user projects have also demonstrated the importance of – and provided – use cases that illustrate how RI can open up research projects to new experiments.
• The Life Science RIs have now published a common website, which will be sustainable financed by all 13 RIs involved and managed by BBMRI-ERIC. This website will be the permanent home of some of the common services developed in CORBEL, like the catalogue of services and the access to training material and webinars, the ELSI helpdesk run by BBMRI and the Innovation Helpdesk run by EATRIS.

An important conclusion from the Final Meeting (2 March 2020, Brussels, see also D2.4) was that the cross-RI pipelines have been very effective tools in opening up RI services to new user communities; several projects stated that they would not have discovered and accessed services without the interdisciplinary CORBEL calls. A second important conclusion was the need for central RI support to simplify project management and help the users to access the advanced facilities across disciplines; CORBEL has provided added value in promoting access to services, tools, and/or expertise that would otherwise not be available to researchers at their local institutions.

Much of CORBEL’s data work will be continued through EOSC-Life, which will address the various data-sharing issues initiated through the project. A particular challenge for the RI is to provide solutions for the acquisition and analysis of multi-modal data in projects – this often needs tailormade solutions.