ELIXIR - Australian BioCommons Collaboration Strategy: 2023-2028

The collaboration strategy between ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons seeks to create a cooperative plan to exploit international synergies between the two research infrastructures. This three-year collaboration will actively involve Australian BioCommons in many of the activities related to the European life science infrastructures. The mutually-beneficial relationship will enhance the complementary areas of both infrastructures; while ELIXIR will offer extensive pan-European experience, Australian BioCommons will provide an international perspective.

The agreement follows interactions in recent years including reciprocal study visits which informed the realisation that the work programmes of ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons align strongly in many areas. The collaboration strategy with ELIXIR was signed on 9 April of 2020, and it will be launched at the ELIXIR All Hands meeting on 9 June 2020 by Niklas Blomberg, Director of ELIXIR, and Andrew Lonie, Director of Australian BioCommons.

The aims of Collaboration Strategy are:

  1. to demonstrate areas of activity and the associated means by which ELIXIR and its members, and Australian BioCommons and its participants, can cooperate to mutual benefit; and

  2. to reveal the nature of arrangements that secure research benefits from that mutual cooperation, and the mechanisms around such arrangements that could be sustained.

This strategy will allow ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons to better support research challenges of international scope, with activities including:

  • International adoption of standards in software platforms, workflows, tools and data (e.g. GA4GH)

  • International collaboration on training and training materials in bioinformatics

  • Methodological platform and tool collaboration (Galaxy as a leading example)

  • Supporting global research communities (such as in metagenomics methods, biodiversity, de-novo genome assembly, phylogenomics, plant phenotyping-genotyping)

  • The delivery of federated solutions to human data preservation and research access

  • The delivery of global identity and access management.

The full Collaboration Strategy is available here.