Open access data and open reproducible analytics are crucial for fast and efficient response to global health crises and can significantly contribute to our understanding of novel viruses. This is the main point of a joint paper by Galaxy teams from the United States, Australia and ELIXIR.
“Only one of the four papers that presented the COVID-19 genome provided access to the raw data. Without the raw data, the entire analysis presented in the three manuscripts is completely unverifiable and irreproducible” says Björn Grüning, one of the authors of the paper. “This is simply unacceptable. We now have the tools and infrastructure which enable any researcher to make their analytical procedures 100% reproducible and transparent” adds Grüning.
To demonstrate the maturity of the public infrastructure and community-curated software for biomedical data analysis, the authors re-analysed all available raw COVID-19 data. Their results showed that the analyses described in the original papers presenting the COVID-19 genome can be reproduced on public infrastructure and using open source tools.
Source: Elixir Europe
