The Seedcase Project: A software- and training-based initiative to develop data engineering tools and skills for open and FAIR infrastructures of research health data
Across much of science, we suffer from a lack of software and data engineering resources, skills, and research-specific tools. This has negative impacts on our abilities to generate reliable results and be productive and effective as researchers. Historically, there has been no or limited sources of funding that allow allocating enough resources for personnel with these technical skills. This is especially an issue for small- to mid-sized clinical and health research groups. Part of the issue is a lack of a general awareness by researchers, funding agencies, and organizations on the importance of software and data engineering in research, as well as the lack of systemic incentive structures to dedicate resources and time to these practices. This has led to an overall low capacity for these skills within research settings. The consequence of which is the many organizational and technical challenges with managing, sharing, building, and using research data, not least of which is the impact on our ability to follow FAIR and open science practices.
The aim of the Seedcase Project (<seedcase-project.org>) is two-fold: To develop software to build and manage infrastructures for data designed by researchers, for researchers; and, to create training material to upskill researchers in modern software and data engineering practices to more effectively tackle the challenges we currently face and will continue to face in the future. Ultimately, we work towards helping researchers do “better science in less time”, not only those in academic settings in Denmark but in industry and across the globe.
This project is funded by an NNF grant (number NNF21OC0069462).