Abstract
The German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure (de.NBI) is a national and academic infrastructure funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The de.NBI provides (i) service, (ii) training, and (iii) cloud computing to users in life sciences research and biomedicine in Germany and Europe and (iv) fosters the cooperation of the German bioinformatics community with international network structures. The de.NBI members also run the German node (ELIXIR-DE) within the European ELIXIR infrastructure. The de.NBI / ELIXIR-DE training platform, also known as special interest group 3 (SIG 3) ‘Training & Education’, coordinates the bioinformatics training of de.NBI and the German ELIXIR node. The network provides a high-quality, coherent, timely, and impactful training program across its eight service centers. Life scientists learn how to handle and analyze biological big data more effectively by applying tools, standards and compute services provided by de.NBI. Since 2015, more than 300 training courses were carried out with about 6,000 participants and these courses received recommendation rates of almost 90% (status as of July 2020). In addition to face-to-face training courses, online training was introduced on the de.NBI website in 2016 and guidelines for the preparation of e-learning material were established in 2018. In 2016, ELIXIR-DE joined the ELIXIR training platform. Here, the de.NBI / ELIXIR-DE training platform collaborates with ELIXIR in training activities, advertising training courses via TeSS and discussions on the exchange of data for training events essential for quality assessment on both the technical and administrative levels. The de.NBI training program trained thousands of scientists from Germany and beyond in many different areas of bioinformatics.
Highlights
In the last decade, researchers in the life sciences have been early victims of the ‘Big Data Problem’ because of technical improvements in the so-called ‘omics’ and image analysis fields including the challenges of the five ‘V’s of big data: volume, veracity, velocity, variety, and value[1]
The need for such training was described recently: The majority (> 95%) of life scientists located in Europe work or plan to work with large datasets, but less than 35% possess the bioinformatics and statistical skills to handle the huge amount of generated data[2]
The German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure program was launched by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in March 2015, and it includes 40 projects that are operated by 30 research institutes organized in eight service centers3. de.NBI offers a large repertoire of high-quality training courses to support life scientists with different expertise levels in bioinformatics and from various research fields
Summary
Network provides a high-quality, coherent, timely, and impactful training program across its eight service centers. Any further responses from the reviewers can be found at the end of the article trainers work together and within different existing German and European (training) communities, e.g. the Galaxy Training Network[2], The Carpentries[4], FAIRDOM5 etc., to connect de.NBI to researchers and to the most important topics in the life sciences community (Figure 1). These topics were introduced in the de.NBI training activities, which range from basic skills to advanced data analysis and expert hackathons including 1–14 day training courses, webinars, mentoring, online training and one-week summer schools[3]. TeSS is ELIXIR’s training platform, providing a one-stop shop for trainers and trainees to discover online information and content, including training materials, events and interactive tutorials
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