Advancing FAIR Data in Toxicology: ELIXIR-NL Contributes to Key Workshops

Health-RI focuses on reusing health data and providing data infrastructures to support research, innovation, and policy. Health-RI is host of ELIXIR-NL, the Dutch Node of  ELIXIR, a European research infrastructure for life sciences, playing a key role in ensuring that toxicological research data is well-organized, accessible, and reusable. ELIXIR-NL actively collaborates with other countries (“nodes”) to FAIRify toxicological data—ensuring that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), and organizes a workshop series open to toxicologists, bioinformaticians, or data managers working in computational toxicology. 

Egon Willighagen (University of Maastricht) and Rob Stierum (TNO) are the co-leads of the INTOXICOM (Integrating the Toxicology Community into ELIXIR) project. The primary goal of this 2-year project is to facilitate the integration of international standards, tools, and resources to enhance toxicology research and risk governance at both national and international levels. This 2-year project involves collaboration from 6 national ELIXIR nodes and is funded by ELIXIR Europe. ELIXIR-NL actively supports researchers in making toxicological data FAIR. In this context, two recent workshops were organized to strengthen toxicology data management and international collaboration. These workshops strengthen national and international collaboration and support the FAIRification of toxicology data, ensuring greater accessibility, re-usage and interoperability across research projects.

FAIRification of Toxicological Research Output

The first workshop, FAIRification of Toxicological Research Output, was hosted at the Health-RI office in Utrecht, Netherlands. It explored how ELIXIR’s Data and Interoperability Platforms can improve toxicological data management, addressing challenges faced by major research consortia such as PARC, ASPIS, and the NanoSafety Cluster; VHP4safety. Participants discussed ways to enhance data accessibility and alignment with FAIR principles.

Enhancing Research Output: FAIR documentation and Tool Management for toxicology studies

The second workshop, Enhancing Research Output: FAIR documentation and Tool Management for toxicology studies, took place at the University of Basel, Switzerland (see photograph). This hands-on session guided researchers in using ELIXIR resources to improve toxicology research outputs. Not only making your research data and toxicological models FAIR, but investing also in FAIR training materials, was one of the main take home messages. Training materials are research outputs and need to be Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reuseable. Participants started to work on model templates for EOSC, bio.tools, and predictive toxicology solutions, focusing on metadata annotation and standardization within toxicology research. Through practical exercises and expert insights, the workshop provided actionable steps for researchers to FAIRify their data, models and tools and training materials.

Workshop on Toxicology Tools in Uppsala 

A third workshop on “Making toxicology tools more accessible and interoperable” is planned for March 26th and 27th in Uppsala, Sweden. Toxicologists, bioinformaticians, or data managers working in computational toxicology and beyond who are interested in learning more about computational toxicology and its applications can register here.  Participation is free of charge!

We thank all participants, speakers, and contributors for their invaluable support in making these workshops a success and look forward to the continuation of this important series.

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