EOSC-Life Guidance and policy on standards and tools to facilitate sharing and reuse of multimodal data (including imaging), cohort integration, and biosamples

Sharing sensitive data is a specific challenge within EOSC-Life. This deliverable reports on the preliminary results of the design of a toolbox to provide information to researchers who wish to share and/or use sensitive data in a public cloud environment in general, and in e-infrastructures adhering to the European Open Science Cloud in particular. The sensitivity of the data may arise from its personal nature, but can also be caused by intellectual property considerations, biohazard concerns, or compliance with the Nagoya protocol. The toolbox will not be based on newly generated content, instead, it will guide 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. The toolbox design is steered by a large working group meeting on a monthly basis with participation of a broad range of research infrastructures (the authors of this report).

The current deliverable report provides a high-level summary of the results that already have been detailed further in documents published in Zenodo over the previous year, and which are referenced in this report. Finally, the document will also provide an outlook for the next steps towards the actual implementation of the toolbox and, ultimately, its sustainability beyond the EOSC-Life project’s lifetime.