BY-COVID: A new project aims to make COVID-19 data accessible. CRS4 works together 52 partners from 20 countries.

On October 13th 2021, the activities of the new BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) project have started. BY-COVID aims to provide comprehensive open data on SARS-CoV-2, and other infectious diseases across scientific, medical, public health and policy domains.

The project will have a strong emphasis on mobilising raw viral sequences, helping to identify and monitor the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants. It will further accelerate access to and linking of data and metadata on SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 (e.g., public health data, data on patient outcomes), enable federated data analysis to conform with data protection regulations – where CRS4 will contribute to facilitating tracking the provenance of analysis results as well as the sharing and reusability of analysis workflows – and harmonisation and management of meta-data and sample- identifiers, as well as long-term cataloguing to ensure interoperability of national and global efforts.

BY-COVID will build on the One-Health approach building on the latest technological advances, exploiting and contributing to the European Open Science Cloud capabilities for data access and federation as well as relevant standards and policies for managing, sharing and reusing research data, and work closely with the ISIDORe project funded through HORIZON Europe. 

BY-COVID will integrate established national and European infrastructures including ELIXIR, BBMRI, ECRIN, PHIRI and CESSDA. It will build on existing efforts, such as the COVID-19 Data Platform and the Versatile Emerging infectious disease Observatory project (VEO), thereby maximising efficiency. Synergies with the European Health Data Space will be developed.

BY-COVID is a truly interdisciplinary (53 partners from 20 countries) project bringing together stakeholders from the biomedical field, hospitals, public health, social sciences and humanities in an unprecedented and unique effort and will increase European readiness for future pandemics enhance genomic surveillance and rapid-response capabilities. BY-COVID serves as a foundation and demonstrator for interdisciplinary work across country borders. The outputs of the project will allow scientists across multiple domains, including SMEs and industry, to access a range of data that will generate new knowledge on infectious disease.

BY-COVID has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101046203.