A FAIR Marketplace for Biomedical Data Custodians and Clinical Researchers

Abstract

The exponential growth in the volume of biomedical data, induced by the increasing digitalization of health care services, has led to a shift of the bottleneck of biomedical research: from data generation to data management and analysis. When shared, the opportunities of secondary use for these data are end-less, from advancing clinical research to an overall improvement of healthcare systems. The FAIR principles have been designed as a guideline for the development of systems that enhance data reusability. The challenges of biomedical data discovery and reuse can be understood and addressed from two distinct points of view: on one side, data custodians are apprehensive about ethical and social issues when turning data discoverable; on the other one, clinical researchers have to perform intensive searches over geographical scattered, heterogeneous data sources and pursue extensive protocols for reusing these data. In this paper we present a web platform intended to serve as a bridge between data custodians and biomedical researchers. Data custodians are able to publish and share several levels of information about biomedical databases, while researchers can search for databases that fulfil their research requirements.