Our letter in support of open COVID-19 data
Published: 29 January 2021
When responding to a health crisis, data play a critical role in understanding transmission, infection and symptoms, and in identifying drug targets, developing vaccines and designing public health responses. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical value of open data and open science and international collaborations to progress scientific discovery when time is of the utmost importance.
We, the scientific community, need to ensure open science is a practised standard, and remove barriers that restrain effective data sharing. As much research and healthcare data as possible need to be taken out of silos and stored into an open, connected and FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) environment to prepare our healthcare systems for future pandemics, and to unleash the fast flow of research advances into clinical use for the benefit of society.
EMBL-EBI has recently launched a public appeal for a more widespread adoption of open and transparent data standard for contrasting the COVID-19 pandemic. If you want to support this initiative, please sign our open letter at https://www.covid19dataportal.org/support-data-sharing-covid19.
About the authors
EMBL-EBI, as the home to the world’s most comprehensive range of freely available data resources, has initiated this call as open data is key to accelerating COVID-19 research.
Source: https://www.covid19dataportal.org/support-data-sharing-covid19