The Dutch ELIXIR Node is hosted by Health-RI, which is a Dutch initiative to build a national integrated health and life-sciences data infrastructure for research and innovation. Health-RI organises this infrastructure and implements the Dutch Open Science and FAIR data policy by making knowledge, equipment and research data optimally accessible for research and innovation.

Health-RI and its users operate in an international research and health data community where infrastructure solutions should work seamlessly across borders. These solutions are increasingly developed in large European or even global collaborations. Health-RI hosts the Dutch nodes in several life science ESFRIs including ELIXIR-NL, BBMRI-NL and EATRIS-NL, and aims to be the linking pin across these ESFRIs and support a smooth collaboration with health and life-sciences research.

ELIXIR-NL acts as an open network where professionals jointly build a digital environment to make life science research data accessible and exchangeable. The hallmark of our activities is interconnecting local technologies, procedures, services, expertise, and more, in close alignment with international data initiatives.

ELIXIR-NL actively scouts in the country to find suitable Dutch representatives who can participate in as many platforms and communities in ELIXIR as possible. And indeed, we participate in almost all platforms and communities.

Health-RI/ELIXIR-NL in short

• With the partnership model in transition ELIXIR-NL has contacts with:
• >50 partners, including all Dutch University Medical Centres, most universities with life science activities, several research institutes, and around 25 life science companies.
• >130 collaborating expert groups.
• We have a world-leading role in developing, promoting, and implementing the FAIR Data principles (i.e., research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable for both humans and computers),
• We promote of adequate Research Data Management.
• We identify training needs and develop new courses, with themes including FAIR data stewardship, bioinformatics, systems biology, Software & Data Carpentry, and Galaxy (in close collaboration with the Netherlands Bioinformatics and Systems Biology research school ‘BioSB’).
• We collaborate with other ESFRI nodes and large research infrastructure initiatives.
• We collaborate with national infrastructures and implementation programmes, such as the Thematic Digital Competence Center for Life Sciences and Health (TDCC-LSH)

Ambition

ELIXIR-NL is part of the strategic roadmap for scientific infrastructure of the Dutch government. Our ambition is to build a professional national research data infrastructure, containing generic as well as discipline-specific components. Our participation in Health-RI together with other health related ESFRI representations in The Netherlands, is an important way in which we shape this ambition. 

Our work on FAIR data and the FAIR Data Train approach are crucial components of this infrastructure; deploying distributed learning to solve privacy and scalability issues surrounding research data (e.g., Personal Health Train and Farm Data Train).

Another crucial component is the development of Digital Research Environments, which support researchers to work together, even when that research includes personal and sensitive data, while complying with all legislation.