COpenPlantOmics (COPO): a Collaborative Bioinformatics Plant Science Platform

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We live in a digital age where we increasingly rely on interconnected resources in our daily lives. Biological science, due to the very nature of the complexity of worldwide research avenues, is typically fragmented. Even though scientific information is published in peer-reviewed articles, it is often badly described and, until very recently, often unavailable to the general public because of journal licensing issues and expensive subscription costs. The field of bioinformatics (the analysis and management of biological data using computational methods) produces many freely available tools for data analysis and exposure that are incredibly useful to researchers. However, these tools often do not interoperate well, meaning that great effort is spent attempting to convert or tweak datasets to fit with other tools that further bioinformatics processes, hindering timely accurate reusable research. Couple this with the lack of descriptive information noted earlier, and knowledge that can be vital to one researcher, team or community can become at least unreproducible (thus letting others confirm findings) at worst unusable.Life scientists are people focused on investigating biological processes. This requires a lot of time, effort and fastidiousness in experimental observation, data collection and analysis. Typically for life scientists, more time is spent on the former: defining and publishing experimental methods and results. The latter, i.e. the data behind these results, is usually badly defined and largely unpublished. For computer scientists, the story is reversed - the focus is on getting to the data. This platform will bridge the gap between these two groups by providing tools and training to both life and computer scientists in the plant bioscience field, in order to help them get their data into the right formats and described uniformly for open research.To do this, the management, interoperability and curation of scientific datasets is key. Researchers need clear guidance and help to:- Manage their data in a concise relevant way that allows immediate reuse by others: Generating data is only one part of the picture. To back up scientific findings, data needs to be made available to others to allow the same degree of rigour and peer review that is enforced for published material. This is not an easy task because the tools and resources required to describe data well and to make data available are typically designed for the computer scientist.- Let them analyse their data easily: Large software development projects like Galaxy provide access to complex analytical tools - we are not aiming to reinvent the wheel in this regard. We aim to engage and collaborate with these existing providers to develop and exploit interfaces to these specialised software projects, so to let descriptive tools and analytical tools communicate efficiently.This project will address these issues directly, providing tools for storing, annotating and sharing valuable information as well as promoting clear guidance, training. Overall this promises to be a major boost to UK plant sciences research. This project aims to promote and build links between scientific knowledge and the tools used to generate that knowledge, addressing the lack of descriptive information about underlying data. By doing so, we will provide a platform comprising both existing tools and novel interoperability processes, allowing researchers easy access to methods of describing their work, feeding directly into analytical software, thus promoting clear and robust best practices in science.Open science is vital to the future generation of researcher, especially to realise the goals of transparent knowledge sharing. This project will remove the barriers that restrict researchers in making their findings freely available to everyone in a consolidated seamless easy-to-use fashion.