BY-COVID D8.3 BY-COVID Long Term Sustainability Plan

During its 36 months, the BY-COVID project promoted and improved FAIR and open data sharing in support of European preparedness for COVID-19 and other infectious disease outbreaks. The BY-COVID results contribute to the outcomes envisaged in the HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EMERGENCY-01 funding call.

This long term sustainability plan was built on the information collected through surveying the partners, and through face to face discussions of a selection of the BY-COVID assets for long term sustainability. The methodology applied in BY-COVID builds around a ‘data mobilisation’ pipeline - ‘Mobilise, Connect, Standardise, Expose & Analyse’. BY-COVID has developed, used and enhanced a set of re-usable and adoptable assets shown to support this. 

Project Deliverables and outputs are all provided as open access material with permissive licensing. Where sensitive data has been processed, the results are the published anonymised and aggregated conclusions. We highlight illustrative use cases of BY-COVID assets, demonstrating their impact and wider adoption. 

The sustainability of the outputs is embedded in the long term sustainability plan of the research infrastructures involved; as stable, mature entities they are well placed to host and maintain many of the assets adopted and enhanced via BY-COVID. Horizon Europe projects will play a significant future role in the development of Europe’s Pandemic Preparedness, and we have taken care to make sure the outputs of BY-COVID are visible to policy makers and can support the developing framework for European Pandemic Preparedness and mitigation of Antimicrobial Resistance.  BY-COVID also contributed to the European Open Science Cloud and European Health Data Spaces; dedicated effort was made to contribute to the EOSC Implementation Roadmap, and the project as a whole is included as a societal impact demonstrator for EOSC and will inform the design of some aspects of the EHDS. BY-COVID  and its outputs have been mentioned in European and international policy documents. We identify some of the blockers of and accelerators to sustainability across the different types of output. 

In conclusion we recognise that the ESFRI Research Infrastructures’ core data services are a critical asset in support of pandemic preparedness; partnerships between agencies, researchers and e-infrastructure providers will be required to further develop and support a pathogen data analysis network; and that the interdisciplinary community of practice developed through the COVID-19 crisis should be supported through periods of preparedness as well as response, in which the Research Infrastructures can play a key role.