ERC Scientific Council supports Global Biodata Coalition
Statement of Support for the Global Biodata Coalition (GBC)
The ERC supports frontier research by providing funding for ERC grantees. We require our grantees to adhere to the principles of Open Science for publications and we encourage them to deposit their data in accordance with the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). In Horizon Europe starting in 2021, grantees will be required to prepare Data Management Plans and to deposit their data in trusted repositories where available.
The ERC Scientific Council is therefore acutely aware (given these requirements), that it is incumbent on funders to encourage the establishment and maintenance of such repositories in all disciplines. From this perspective, although the ERC does not itself fund data infrastructures, we would like to state our support for a new initiative, the Global Biodata Coalition. The GBC is a coalition of funders of Biodata Resources. Its goal is to enable those funders to better coordinate and manage their funding, to ensure sustained support and to prioritize support for a set of Global Core Data Resources ("Nature 543, 179(2017)").
Currently funding for such resources, which are increasingly important in biomedical and environmental research, comprise less than 1% of funding for research in this area. These data are essential for ERC’s Life Science researchers and for frontier developments in biotechnological applications and pharma. They are increasingly used in clinical and environmental settings, where researchers both provide and use the data. To implement Open Science targets for FAIR sharing of data, serious consideration of these issues is required. In the physical sciences and engineering, and in the social sciences and humanities, all of which generate increasing amounts of data, similar initiatives would also be welcomed, where they do not yet exist.
As a Scientific Council we encourage both researchers and funders in the Life Sciences to support and engage with this process, to enable the development of a coherent, integrated, robust global data infrastructure for the biological, environmental and medical sciences.
