EOSC-Life WP4 Toolbox: Categorisation system for resources to be referenced in the toolbox for sharing of sensitive data

The Horizon 2020 project EOSC-Life brings together the 13 Life Science ‘ESFRI’ research infrastructures to create an open, digital and collaborative space for biological and medical research. Sharing sensitive data is a specific challenge within EOSC-Life. For that reason, a toolbox is developed, providing information to researchers who wish to share sensitive data or to use sensitive data. The sensitivity of the data may arise from its personal nature but can also be caused by intellectual property considerations, biohazard concerns, or the Nagoya protocol. The toolbox will not create new content, instead, it will allow researchers to find existing resources that are relevant for sharing sensitive data across all participating research infrastructures (F in FAIR).  The toolbox will provide links to recommendations, procedures, and best practices, as well as to software (tools) to support data sharing and reuse. It will be based upon a tagging (categorisation) system, allowing consistent labelling and categorisation of resources, in terms most relevant to data sharing tasks and activities and referring to 8 dimensions (resource type, research field, research design, data type, stage in data sharing life cycle, geographical scope, specific topics or keywords and targeted group). In this document the categorisation system is described and applied to examples. It is planned to evaluate the categorisation system within EOSC-Life in a larger pilot study.