Beyond COVID

Beyond-COVID (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, enable federated data analysis conform with data protection regulations, 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 align with 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 proposal funded through the sibling-topic from the emergency call (HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EMERGENCY-02). 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 (55 partners from 19 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. 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.