International collaboration has local impact: ELIXIR comes to town

Members of the BioCommons team with ELIXIR’s Katharina Heil and Frederik Coppens. Left to right: Johan Gustafsson, Jeff Christiansen, Katharina Heil, Melissa Burke, Frederik Coppens, Christina Hall, Tiff Nelson, Ziad Al Bkhetan.

Thanks to the strong connections that have been established between ELIXIR (the European life science data infrastructure) and Australian BioCommons, a large group of research infrastructure specialists from Europe visited Australia over July and August. An ELIXIR travel grant gave the opportunity to deepen working relationships and connections between ELIXIR and the Australian BioCommons, to integrate Galaxy service innovations globally, and to enable new connections to be made. The group of 14 ELIXIR software developers, system administrators and service administrators, along with the ELIXIR Belgium Head of Node and Co-lead of the ELIXIR Galaxy Community, Frederik Coppens, and the ELIXIR Programme Manager Communities and Training, Katharina Heil, were hosted in Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne. It's a wonderful example of why we were enthusiastic to extend our collaboration agreement to 2028.

There were many strategically important outcomes during the visit:

• Katharina and Frederik accompanied BioCommons to a meeting with NCRIS representatives at the Department of Education in Canberra, which resulted in the suggestion of a potential joint session to represent the ELIXIR-BioCommons collaboration agreement at the upcoming International Conference on Research Infrastructures (ICRI 2024)

• A visit to the National Computational Infrastructure by Katharina and Frederik led to discussions about ELIXIR’s possible involvement in Supercomputing Asia

• Sveinung Gundersen (ELIXIR Norway) presented FAIRtracks, a new RDA working group on FAIRification of genome sequence annotations, at the Galaxy Community Conference and International Congress of Genetics. Work to incorporate the Australian Apollo service as a use case for FAIRtracks is continuing

• BioCommons connected Katharina and Australian Research Data Commons’ (ARDC) Kathryn Unsworth to discuss the latest developments in Digital Research Skills Australasia (DReSA), based on ELIXIR’s TeSS (Training eSupport System)

• Katharina and Frederik presented the Using FAIR by design approaches to scale the uplift of FAIR Research Data Management practices in research ARDC webinar 

• Katharina was an invited guest at a careers-focused fireside chat hosted by COMBINE Australia, the student subcommittee of The Australian Bioinformatics And Computational Biology Society (ABACBS)

• Frederik met BioCommons’ Johan Gustafsson to continue discussing the future directions of WorkflowHub, as part of Johan’s ongoing position as joint product owner of WorkflowHub

• Katharina shared her knowledge on building active communities around research infrastructure in an interactive BioCommons hosted online meeting of local scientific community builders.

The larger group participated in the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2023) and associated events lasting 2 weeks. As described previously, the Galaxy Australia team showcased the innovations to the Galaxy Platform that they are driving at GCC2023, and the ELIXIR group’s presence provided wonderful opportunities for in-depth sharing of technical learnings and best practices that will have a long lasting impact on the overall global Galaxy project.

Galaxy Australia’s leadership has been recognised with the invitation of Gareth Price to join the Galaxy Executive Board. Intensive planning and substantial improvements to the Galaxy ecosystem were accelerated by key ELIXIR team members extending their visit, made possible by the generosity of the Galaxy Executive Board member, Ross Lazarus, who accommodated them in Melbourne.

Snapshots of the ELIXIR team’s visit:

• Saskia Hiltemann co-delivered a presentation with Gareth Price (Galaxy Australia project lead) on Managing hands-on data analysis training with Galaxy

• Katharina and Frederik gave an ARDC hosted webinar on Bringing FAIR Research Data Management to Researchers at Scale

• Björn Grüning spoke at the BioCommons ‘BioChats’ meeting in August on Developing, deploying, and executing scientific data analyses in Galaxy and beyond.