Open Science in COVID-19 research

Update on ZonMw’s approach to optimize reuse of COVID-19 related data

Under the urgency of the outbreak of the corona pandemic, we take a number of actions to enable researchers in ZonMw’s COVID-19 projects to create FAIR data or - as a minimum - FAIR metadata that can be used by humans as well as machines. As a result, data and metadata become findable through computer search, and ready for access with learning-algorithms (comparable to the Personal Health Train concept).

This approach allows other research on COVID-19 to directly benefit from ZonMw’s projects, accelerating solutions for the corona crisis.  

These activities include:

• VODAN for COVID-19 patient data
• FAIR data services and a national COVID-19 data portal
• An advanced approach for creating FAIR data: three-point FAIRification Framework
• A national COVID-19 data portal for the metadata to observational hospital data,
• Workshops and training on the FAIRIfication framework as part of the Support & Community building for researchers and data stewards.

All focus areas in the ZonMw COVID-19 programme

The activities are intended for all COVID-19 projects that ZonMw has granted funding in 2020. They are part of data management planning as required for ZonMw funded projects. The activities for creating FAIR data and metadata will be organised for clusters of projects with similar topics, subdisciplines, and/or methods and techniques. Creating FAIR data will therefore be tailored to quantitative as well as qualitative research; biomedical, behavioral, and social economic research, or any other discipline in ZonMw’s COVID-19 programme. 

Data experts, domain experts and their research communities

A crucial aspect of the FAIRification approach is that domain experts (researchers) collaborate with data experts. In clusters of projects with similar topics (etc), they form research communities. They decide on the standards, technologies, and infrastructure that fit in their research area best. These are then captured in community specific metadata schemes that researchers can apply in their projects, and show in their DMPs.

Support and community building

For creating FAIR data and metadata, the data stewards and researchers of the COVID-19 projects receive training and support from FAIR data experts at GO FAIR and Health-RI. They therefore organise a number of workshops and training in autumn 2020. The dates can be found here.

In addition, the DTL Data steward Intrerest Group organises support and community building for local data stewards to exchange ideas, and solve challenges.

Select for more information about:

1. What researchers need to do for a grant proposal and research project
2. Transparency and sharing of research findings and data
3. Creating FAIR data, tailored to the COVID-19 research community

Read more about:

• ZonMw’s research programmes for COVID-19

Guidance

• RDA COVID-19 Working Group Recommendations and Guidelines for FAIR data management in different research settings (look for regular updates)
• EU Horizon 2020 Guidelines for open access to publications, data and other research outputs
• COVID-19 open access initiative

Networks, data services

• VODAN, Viral Outbreak Data Network, to create FAIR (and machine readable) (meta)data, e.g. with the COVID-19 case record form (CRF) of the WHO (see GitHub and BioPortal, Castor).More on these and other VODAN deliverables (summer 2020).
• VODAN-in-a-box, a toolset to facilitate the capture of data related to virus outbreaks and the publication of metadata describing these datasets. The resulting infrastructure makes real world COVID-19 patient data available for research, under well-defined conditions and with patient privacy well protected.
• Health-RI, COVID-19 related initiatives
• Genotyping COVID-19 patient DNA (see Genetic laboratory of ErasmusMC)
• COVID-19 HOTEL@ DTL serves COVID-19 projects to rapidly rationalise phenomena observed in real world situations, generate hypotheses that can be laboratory tested, and subsequently serve decision making in the clinical setting. The COVID-19 Hotel enables an in silico rationalisation workflow, making use of FAIR data.
  COVID-19 HOTEL@ DTL

Portals to find projects, data and other resources

• COVID-19 data portal
• Databronnen COVID-19 (RIVM's overview of data collections from health research)
• GLOPID-R is the global research collaboration of research funders for infectious disease Preparedness. ZonMw is a member. GLOPID-R guides researchers to the COVID-19 research project tracker, which lists programmes, projects and datasets, mapped to the priority topics of the WHO
• The WHO has developed the WHO research roadmap on the 2019 novel coronavirus, and the WHO database of publications
• Information from the ministry of Health (VWS) about artificial intelligence in health (Data voor gezondheid), and COVID-19 (Wegwijzer AI en Corona)

COVID-19 related research initiatives

REMAP-CAP uses an innovative trial design to efficiently evaluate multiple interventions simultaneously (see also the webinar session 4, May 7 2020)

CAPACITY and the FAIR data project (statistical analyses and machine learning models for insights about the relation between cardiovascular history and related complications in COVID-19 patients)

Please inform us about more other COVID-19 research and FAIR data initiatives: toegangtotdata@zonmw.nl