BeYond-COVID (BY-COVID) is a Horizon Europe funded project, which will tackle the data challenges linked to SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases, that can hinder effective pandemic response. Building a multidisciplinary data ecosystem for COVID-19, the project works towards sustainability, accessibility and a more agile reaction to future threats.
BY-COVID, takes an interdisciplinary approach that unites life science, medical, policy, social science and public health experts from across Europe. Led by ELIXIR, the project has 53 partners from 19 European countries. The BY-COVID project started in October 2021, will run for three years and is part of the European Commission’s HERA Incubator plan ‘Anticipating together the threat of COVID-19 variants’.
DANS is involved in three BY-COVID work packages as an affiliated entity of CESSDA, the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives. BY-COVID aims to bring together and harmonise a broad range of relevant (meta)data from various disciplines, making them available for use by other parts of the project and ultimately its end users. DANS leads the part of work focussing on socio-economic data sources, and especially on transfer and enhancement of the metadata of social sciences datasets, so that they can be used together with e.g. (non-) patient clinical and bio-molecular data. DANS also participates in the work related to a demonstrator project, which aims to show how the data ecosystem developed by BY-COVID can be used to assess and understand viral variants, outcomes, and responses, also through reviewing research questions and their data requirements. Finally, DANS is involved in capacity building and training of the BY-COVID platform users and data providers, in order for them to analyse and manage their data using FAIR principles and advanced research tools and methodologies.
