Coordinated Open Data Will Drive Next-Level Health Research

ELIXIR, founded in December 2013, is a joint effort between several European countries for the development of coordinated, integrated and sustainable public bioinformatics services. “There are many public databases, software tools and training courses that already have extensive usage by academia and the life sciences industry. However, there is lot of fragmentation, so those resources don’t always work closely together,” Andrew Smith, ELIXIR’s head of external relations, told In Vivo. The group aims to better coordinate the evolution of bioinformatic services across those member countries.

ELIXIR has connected 22 countries. In each participating country there is a national effort to coordinate the public bioinformatics services. “Overall, across those 22 countries that are involved, we have 220 institutes