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Town hall meeting: Offshore omics data access

Australian BioCommons aims to inform national strategies to improve access to data from international repositories for Australian researchers, and we need your help to identify what challenges you face, or strategies you think will improve the situation.

The open town hall meeting is an opportunity to:

  • Share your experiences accessing and downloading data from various international omics data repositories for life science research

  • Explore the strategies or infrastructure that you think could be deployed nationally in Australia to improve the status quo concerning accessing data housed in these repositories

Before the meeting, we invite you to complete this short survey regarding which data repositories you access, the frequency of download requests, the volume of the downloaded data, what infrastructure you have in place locally for data management and analysis, and the challenges faced. We’ll summarise the findings so far in the meeting to get the conversation going.

Who can participate:

Any life science researcher who is accessing and downloading omics data from international repositories or cloud services is welcome to attend and participate.

When:

18 July 2024, 11 am AEST / 10:30 am ACST / 9 am AWST

How to join:

On the day of the town hall, please use this link to join us online via Zoom.

Background:

Public and freely accessible omics data repositories, such as those hosted by EMBL-EBI, NCBI, DDBJ, and others overseas are a key part of the global life science research infrastructure. Accessing and reusing these data by researchers all around the world is a common practice in scientific research.

Consultations undertaken by the Australian BioCommons over the last few years have identified that some Australian life scientists face challenges when attempting to access and download data housed in these offshore omics data, particularly when data is required at scale, or quickly. Visit our activity page for more information on how we’re helping Australian researchers interface with international repositories.