CORBEL has now concluded the 3rd of its 3 phases:
• Months 1-12: Coordination and preparation: Mapping efforts, establishment of user and stakeholder forums, technology road mapping and gap analysis
• Months 13-37: Implementation: Execution of user-led research efforts, development of shared service platform
• Months 38-57: Assessment and validation: Testing and validation of shared service platform against user requirements, embedding of services within the established RIs, providing the foundation for sustainable services
The partners achieved all 51 deliverables and 49 milestones.
Development of advanced cross-RI service pipelines (Objective 1) was driven through user projects. CORBEL launched two open calls for users with 31 projects selected from 50 applications via external peer-review. The Medical Infrastructure Users Forum has brought together EU projects, ERA-NETS, JPIs and other stakeholders to discuss and shape service offerings for transnational health projects.
The development of scalable, harmonised solutions cross-RI (Objective 2) has delivered a shared quality management strategy, harmonised user access and project review via the ARIA system and a joint strategy for managing federated user identities for single-sign on access to computational services.
CORBEL has facilitated user access and service use (Objective 3) by delivering a continuously updated shared resource portal and together with NIH Data Commons established simple guidance on solutions for FAIR data management. These recommendations are now being embedded in user projects and contributed to an “interoperability knowledge hub” that enable users to manage data across domain boundaries. Our recommendations are adopted by 3rd parties, e.g. data management guidelines for ERC and EC COVID-19 research projects.
Good RI service is dependent on committed, highly trained operators. CORBEL has addressed the challenge of identifying, attracting and training staff. The project has developed a common competency framework for RI operators, with a focus on distributed research infrastructures and mapped the available training courses and e-learning resources in on-course to this framework. CORBEL has also provided a staff-exchange programme and a service focussed training programme.
The CORBEL project has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic - several user projects had to postpone facility access - but the solutions established in the project could be rapidly refocused to support COVID-19 research. User access pipelines have been providing support to screening projects for drug repurposing and structural analysis of SARS-CoV-2 virus. The data integration and management solutions developed supported the development of the European COVID-19 data portal (
https://www.covid19dataportal.org/(odnośnik otworzy się w nowym oknie)) and DataHubs to manage the access and sharing of SARS-CoV-2 viral genomes. The BBMRI Locator was extended to provide information on samples for COVID-19 research in European biobanks.
