Funded R&D Projects

We have receiced funds from: UKRI (BBSRC, MRC, NERC -via the ELIXIR-UK Node- and Research England -via the UKRN), Wellcome Trust, as well as the European Commission (EC), the USA National Institutes of Health (NIH), and pharmas.

New and ongoing

2024-2027: EU Horizon Europe “OSTrails: Planning, tracking, and assessing scientific knowledge production" - Lead PI: Natalia Manola, OpenAIRE; University of Oxford PI: Sansone SA. Lead contributors: Lister A., Thurston M. An interdisciplinary project, involving 38 partners (including funders and research organizations, as well as EOSC Science Clusters) set to deliver methodologies, services, tools and guidance needed to plan research activity, track its impact and contribution, and assess its compliance with the FAIR principles. Specifically, for each stage, OSTrails aims to: PLAN by increasing the efficacy of Data Management Plans (DMPs), towards more researcher-centric and educative “machine actionable” DMPs (maDMPs). TRACK: by establishing an open, interoperable and high quality ecosystem of Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) supporting different types of research products, their relationships and metrics used to evaluate them. ASSESS: by delivering modular and extendable FAIR tests, which makes the metrics “machine actionable” (maFAIRTest), complemented by user guidance, and that can be implemented in tools assisting any stage of the research life cycle. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to the OSTrials via the use and enhancement of FAIRsharing for the planning, tacking and assessing components

2024-2028: ELIXIR “Interoperability Platform: 2024-28 Scientific Programme - University of Oxford PIs: Sansone SA., Lister L., Rocca-Serra P. Contribution to the activities of the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform, in particular the continued development, use and integration of ISA, FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook with complementary resources.

2023-2026: EU Horizon Europe “TIER2: Enhancing trust, intergrity and efficiency in research through next level reproducibility impact pathways" - Lead PI: Tony Ross-Hellauer, Know-Center, Graz, Austria; University of Oxford PI: Sansone SA., Co-I: Rocca-Serra P. Lead contributors: Lister A., Osborne C. An interdisciplinary project, involving 11 project partners from Europe (including two publishers), TIER2 will boost knowledge on reproducibility, create tools, engage communities, implement interventions and policy across different contexts to increase re-use and overall quality of research results. TIER2 has selected three broad research areas - social, life, and computer sciences, and two cross-disciplinary stakeholder groups - research publishers and funders to systematically investigate reproducibility across contexts. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to TIER2's work on definition of reproducibility (conceptualisation), and via the use and network of FAIRsharing for the co-creation of (i) educational material for journal editors, and (ii) the enhancement of journals' Data Availability Statements (DAS), testing both with selected publishers (interventions).

2022-2027: EU Horizon Europe “Agro-Serv - Lead PI: Michel Boer, CNRS, France; University of Oxford PI: Rocca-Serra P., Co-I: Sansone SA. Lead contributor: Lister A. An interdisciplinary project, involving 49 project partners from Europe, which will proposes a transdisciplinary offer of services, integrating the actors of the agriculture system in the research process, and support the implementation of a resilient and sustainable agri-food system. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to AgroServ via the used and enhanchement of FAIRsharing content and the creation of new recipes in the FAIR Cookbook.

2021-2024: EU Horizon Europe “BY-COVID - Lead PI: Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Hub; University of Oxford PI: Rocca-Serra P., Co-I: Sansone SA. Lead contributor: Lister A. An interdisciplinary project, involving 53 project partners from across 19 countries within Europe, which strives to tackle the data challenges that can hinder effective pandemic response by making (COVID19 and in principle other infectious diseases) data accessible to scientists in laboratories but also to anyone who can use it, such as medical staff in hospitals or government officials. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to BY-COVID via the use and enhancement of FAIRsharing, in particular infectious diseases data sources and standards, making them also more discoverable to users and other stakeholders in the EOSC ecosystem.

2022-2024: UK Research England “Enhancing UK Research Excellence: A consortium approach to improving institutional practice - Lead PI: Marcus Munafò, University of Bristol; University of Oxford PI: Sansone SA. Lead contributor: Lister A., Rocca-Serra P. The UK Reproducibility Network (UKRN) is a national peer-led consortium that aims to ensure the UK retains its place as a centre for world-leading research. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to reprodicibility through the lens of FAIR, via FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook, signposting FAIR-enabling data resources, standards and policies, and delivering educational material.

2021-2026: EU Horizon 2020 “Precision Toxicology - Lead PI: John Colbourne, University of Birmingham, UK; University of Oxford PI: Sansone SA., Co-I: Rocca-Serra P. Lead contributor: Batista D. A consortium of 16 organizations, including the USA NIH, to establish a new testing paradigm for chemical safety assessment, which identifies molecular key event biomarkers predictive of chemically induced adverse health effects in humans and facilitates their uptake into regulatory and industry practice. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to PreTox via the research and development of resources for FAIR data management and data sharing, as well as submission to regulators; these include the ISA framework (for describing experimental details), and educational resources such as the FAIR Cookbook (with best practices for research data management and hands-on recipes to make and keep data FAIR).

2021-2024: UKRI “ELIXIR-UK: FAIR Data Stewardship Training - PIs: Krzysztof Poterlowicz, University of Bradford; Robert Andrew, Cardiff University; Neil Hall, Earlham Institute; Carole Goble, University of Manchester; Sansone SA., University of Oxford. Lead contributors for Oxford: Lister A., Rocca-Serra P. Joint project with key ELIXIR-UK institutes to establish a national data stewardship training programme, exploiting our ELIXIR-UK Node network of 18 member organisations, to deliver and embed training within UK universities and institutions. Our Data Readiness Group contributes to DaSH via FAIRsharing and the FAIR Cookbook.

2019-2024: Wellcome Trust “FAIRsharing service: supporting the research life cycle - PI: Sansone SA., University of Oxford. Lead contributors: Lister A., Thurston M. Re-development of FAIRsharing as a high-quality service to accelerate discovery, selection and use of repositories, standards, policies; increasing their producers’ satisfaction in terms of visibility, reuse and citations of the resources, and consumers guidance.

2017-2024: UK BBSRC “Japan-UK collaboration” - PI: Sansone SA., University of Oxford. Lead contributors: Lister A., Thurston M. Strengthen relations with the National Bioscience Database Center to better link FAIRsharing and the Integbio catalogue, towards a fully synchronised content transfer workflow to better serve the research and publisher community.

Completed (when in Oxford)

2019-2023: EU Horizon 2020 “EOSC-Life: infrastructure for life science data - Lead PI: Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Hub; University of Oxford PI: Sansone SA. Lead contributors: Lister A., Rocca-Serra P. A joint project between 39 institutions (leading major Europe’s biological and medical sciences’ research infrastructures) to achieve a shared vision of an open collaborative digital space for European Life Science and biomedical scientists. We lead on the creation of a tool to assess the level of data readiness (in terms of findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability).

2019-2022: EU and EFPIA IMI “FAIRplus - making life science data FAIR - Lead PI: Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Hub; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra. Joint project with ELIXIR Hub, several Nodes and pharmas (AstraZeneca, Janssen, Eli Lilly, GSK, Novartis, Bayer and Boehringer Ingelheim) to develop guidelines and tools to make data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable, according to the FAIR principles. We lead on the design of the data FAIRness activities, including a FAIR Maturity Model and a FAIR Cookbook.

2018-2022: Wellcome Trust “ISA and InterMine: accelerating and rewarding data sharing” - PIs: Sansone, University of Oxford; Gos Micklem, University of Cambridge. Lead contributor: Rocca-Serra P., A joint project to further develop and combine ISA and InterMine into an integrated system implementing a workflow to incentivise metadata collection, and the ability to automatically find, collect, integrate, reuse and publish data. We drive the ISA component and the collaboration with journal editors and publishers.

2019-2022: USA NIH “Common Fund Data Ecosystem - PIs: Owen White University of Maryland, USA; Avi Maayan, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA; Titus Brown, University of California, Davis, USA; Sansone SA, University of Oxford. A joint project to improve the FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) of four complex Common Fund dataset from the Gabriella Miller Kids First Pediatric Research (Kids First), Genotype Tissue Expression (GTEx), Library of Integrated Network-based Cellular Signatures (LINCS), and Human Microbiome Project (HMP) programs.

2018-2023: ELIXIR Hub “Interoperability Platform: Implementation Studies” - University of Oxford PIs: Sansone, Rocca-Serra, McQuilton. Contribution to the activities of the “Interoperability Platform”, and a set of implementation studies (in collaboration with ELIXIR Nodes) on data interoperability aspects: “Bioschemas for Data Discoverability”, “Data FAIRification", "Biocuration Landscape”, "Data Validation", “Fluxomics Data Standardization”

2017-2021: EU and ESFRI Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) “IMPRiND: inhibiting misfolded protein propagation in neurodegenerative diseases” - Lead and University of Oxford PI: George Tofaris, Co-Is: Sansone, Rocca-Serra. Part of Europe’s largest public-private initiative, this consortium of pharmas and academics works to identify druggable targets modulating misfolded proteins in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. We lead on the data curation and management activities.

2015-2019: EU Horizon 2020 “ELIXIR-EXCELERATE: fast-track ELIXIR implementation and drive early user exploitation across the life sciences” Lead PI: Niklas Blomberg, ELIXIR Hub; University of Oxford PI: Sansone. Coordinated by the ELIXIR Hub, the project involves 46 partners from 17 countries to help ELIXIR coordinate and extend national and international data resources and ensure the delivery of world-leading data services, supporting all sectors of life science R&D. We lead on several data interoperability and training related activities.

2017-2018: USA NIH BD2K Data Commons Pilot “Cloud agnostic architecture to safely access, reuse indexed FAIR objects” - Lead PI: Lucila Ohno-Machado, UCSD, USA; University of Oxford PI: Sansone.

2017-2018: USA NIH BD2K Data Commons Pilot “Facilitation center” - Lead PI: Owen White University of Maryland, USA; University of Oxford PI: Sansone.

2017-2018: USA NIH BD2K Data Commons Pilot “Development and implementation plan for community supported FAIR guidelines and metrics” - Lead PI: Avi Maayan, The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, USA; University of Oxford PI: Sansone.

2015-2018: EU Horizon 2020 “MultiMot: infrastructure for cell migration data” Lead PI: Lennart Martens, VIB, Belgium; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2015-2018: EU Horizon 2020 “PhenoMeNal: infrastructure for phenome and metabolome analysis” Lead PI: Christoph Steinbeck, EBI; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2015-2018: UK BBSRC “COPO: collaborative open plant omics infrastructure” University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2015-2018: UK BBSRC “China-UK collaboration: sharing of metabolomics data and their analyses” - PI: Sansone, University of Oxford - travel award.

2014-2018: USA NIH BD2K “CEDAR: centre for extended data annotation and retrieval” Lead PI: Mark Musen, Stanford, USA; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2014-2018: USA NIH BD2K “bioCADDIE: biomedical healthcare data discovery and indexing engine” Lead PI: Lucila Ohno-Machado, UCSD, USA; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2014-2017: UK MRC, BBSRC and NERC “Delivering the ELIXIR UK Node” University of Oxford PI: Sansone.

2012-2017: EU and EFPIA IMI “eTRIKS: European translational information and knowledge management services” Lead PI: Yike Guo, Imperial College, UK; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra (joined in 2014).

2012-2015: EU FP7 “COSMOS: infrastructure, standards for metabolomics data” Lead PI: Christoph Steinbeck, EBI; University of Oxford PI: Sansone.

2012-2015: UK BBSRC “UK-China partnership: establishing common standards and curation practices” - University of Oxford PI: Sansone - travel award.

2011-2015: UK BBSRC and NERC “Building a global metagenomics portal to handle next-generation sequencing data and associated metadata” EBI PI: Sarah Hunter; University of Oxford PI: Sansone, Co-I: Rocca-Serra.

2010-2014: UK BBSRC and NERC “Omics data sharing: the Investigation / Study / Assay (ISA) Infrastructure” Lead PI: Sansone, University of Oxford; NERC CEH PI: Dawn Field.

Completed (when at EMBL-EBI)

2009-2010: UK BBSRC, “MICheckout: Supporting Compliance with Consensus Reporting Requirements” - EMBL-EBI co-I: Sansone.

2007-2010: UK BBSRC, “Omics Data Standards: Synergy and Implementations” - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.

2007-2010: UK NERC Bioinformatics Centre, partnership funds - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.

2006-2010: EU FP6, “Carcinogenomics" - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.

2006-2008: UK BBSRC, “Ontology for Reporting Multi-Omics Experiments” - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.

2004-2008: EU FP6, “Nugo Nutrigenomics" - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.

2004-2007: NIH NIEHS, partnership funds - EMBL-EBI PI: Sansone.