On 3 June, a national portal for accelerating COVID-19 research was launched. This portal will make it easier for researchers as well as the public to find, share, and work with research data related to the novel corona virus.
During this pandemic, the need and desire to share research data has increased, and we have seen a number of initiatives to promote openness and collaboration in this research field. In order to increase transparency and accelerate research related to COVID-19, the European Commission has decided to coordinate European research through an open platform within the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) initiative.
The Swedish contribution to this initiative is a new data portal that brings together research data and related material, with support from Swedish research infrastructures. This data portal is primarily intended for researchers, but can be utilised by a wider public. The portal contains data, metadata, and information related to COVID-19, together with services and tools that make it easier to process and analyse the material. There are also support resources for researchers who want to share data and make them accessible both nationally and internationally.
The Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal is operated by SciLifeLab, and among the organisations that contribute with resources are NBIS (National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden) and the Swedish National Data Service. The Swedish Research Council is responsible for coordinating the Swedish portal with the European platform.
—This is an urgent matter, so I’m glad we can contribute to the data portal. At the moment, the collaboration is just getting started, but it’s a good initiative and will hopefully make things easier for Swedish COVID-19 researchers, says Linda Härdelin, Research Data Advisor in SND and a member of the Swedish COVID-19 Data Portal coordination team.