European research communities join forces in COVID19 fight

OCRE and European research communities are joining forces to address the covid19 outbreak through the search for a vaccine.

The key to this joint effort comes from the concept of Open Science and the open sharing of data. This - through the usage of cloud services - can greatly accelerate research and discovery, allowing for an effective response to the coronavirus emergency by boosting the availability, discoverability and management of the research data and outputs.

OCRE (Open Clouds for Research Environments), looks to bring this open access to the researcher in the form of cloud services by bridging the gap between them and the supplier. In the case of COVID19 OCRE recently launched a distribution of vouchers for early career researchers carrying out research on COVID19 and related topics.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as fundamental enabler of Open Science has facilitated the joint approach in the fight against COVID19. This has seen the use of projects like HADDOCK (High Ambiguity Driven protein-protein DOCKing), a biology simulation tool that models interactions between virus proteins and human ones, which is a platform and a thematic service under the EU-funded EOSC-Hub project. Also including the DEEP-Hybrid Data Cloud project which processes and shares huge amounts of data and is currently supporting genetic studies trying to highlight genetic traits explaining severe forms of COVID-19.

The European Commission launched the European COVID-19 Data Platform providing an open environment where researchers can store and share datasets. This is being supported through the Zenodo COVID-19 Community, jointly created by OpenAIRE and CERN. The Research Data Alliance (RDA) has also launched an RDA COVID-19 Working Group to define guidelines and best practices on data sharing and have already published the first release of the RDA COVID-19 recommendations and guidelines.

There is an army behind the Open Science community and OCRE as well as many others are using this incredible tool to find a coronavirus vaccine. OCRE and EOSC aim to make science more efficient through better sharing of resources, more reliable through better verification and more responsive to society’s needs.