It is our great pleasure to announce that the 1st edition of the “Ready for BioData Management?: Data Stewardship for Life Sciences Training Program”, hosted by ELIXIR Portugal (BioData.pt), starts today, the 21st of February 2022, with the purpose of training the first generation of Data Stewards for the life sciences in data management, open science and FAIR data principles. 

The design and planning of this course were a joint effort of Ana Portugal Melo (ELIXIR Portugal), Celia van Gelder (ELIXIR Netherlands), Pedro Príncipe (University of Minho), and Filipa Pereira (FCT-FCCN). This course, organized by BioData.pt | ELIXIR Portugal in collaboration with 13 other scientific organizations, will be attended by 24 researchers from 14 Portuguese R&I organizations and counts with a panel of 25 trainers, including 2 from ELIXIR-Netherlands and 1 from ELIXIR-Greece.

Framed by the ELIXIR Converge (work package 2) and the ELIXIR Training Platform activities, this ELIXIR Training Program will unfold from February to October 2022 and it will comprise a four-session introductory module covering the basic concepts of Data Stewardship, followed by two assignments. Later on, upon a third assignment, this program will close with a face-to-face consolidation course.

We expect that the ELIXIR Portugal “Ready for BioData Management?: Data Stewardship for Life Sciences Training Program” will greatly contribute to enabling the Portuguese research community to excel in the application of the FAIR data principles in managing the increasing amount of data produced by its activity, and remain engaged with open science.