Personalized Health Technologies 2024: Enabling open and collaborative research with Renku

Nexus and Swiss Data Science Center organized the workshop "Empowering FAIR data and reproducible research" within the Personalized Health Technologies 2024 event. Participants could learn about the Gatekeeper project, where Renku is leveraged for empowering researchers to build collaborative communities within the biomedical domain by bringing together data, code and compute.

Open research leads not only to better collaboration and reuse, but also better efficiency for the individual researcher. A research project represents a complex orchestration of data, code, and compute resources: Where is this data located? Which code generated it? And where can it run? Bringing together these resources not only poses an administrative burden for the researcher, but also often blocks collaboration and makes it harder to trace and reproduce the research process. There is a need for technology to help researchers work in a rigorous, transparent, and reproducible (RTR) fashion and achieve FAIR data management (ensuring that all data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable).

The Gatekeeper project aims to address this need within the Biomedical domain by leveraging the open-source Renku platform, which connects the ecosystem of data, code, and compute to empower researchers to build collaborative communities.

In this workshop, the participants learned about some of the tools and techniques important for FAIR data management and RTR research, and learned how to seamlessly integrate their own research data and code into the Renku platform. In addition, participants provided valuable feedback about new requirements and necessary extensions. We acknowledge the participants' proactivity and constructive discussions.