Since 2021, the BY-COVID project has united 53 partners from 19 countries in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary effort to deliver open, accessible data on SARS-CoV-2 and other infectious diseases. By integrating scientific, medical, public health, and policy perspectives, this initiative developed key resources like the COVID-19 Data Platform and the Pathogens Portal, improving Europe’s preparedness for future pandemics and enhancing rapid response capabilities.

CESSDA partners joining the large Consortium

As a leading research infrastructure in the social sciences and humanities, CESSDA joined the BY-COVID consortium to advance the project’s goals. The CESSDA Main Office participated alongside five of its Service Providers: the Data Archiving and Networked Services (DANS - NL), the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD -FI), the Greek research infrastructure for the social sciences (So.Da.Net/EKKE - GR), the Czech Social Science Data Archive (ČSDA - CZ) and the Slovenian Social Science Data Archives (ADP - SI). 

CESSDA joined the BY-COVID Final conference in Brussels (attribute to BY-COVID Project)

Integrating Socioeconomic Data

DANS, FSD and EKKE, led the development of a robust harvesting tool to periodically harvest metadata from various metadata providers. This tool has enabled metadata from the CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC) and the European University Institute (EUI) COVID-19 Social Sciences Data Portal to be discoverable on the COVID-19 Data Portal. CESSDA partners worked towards sustainability of the tool via testing the container set-up and adding source code to a public Github repository.

Furthermore, the Dutch COVID-19 Data Support Programme relevant socioeconomic metadata have been exposed and are also discoverable. It did so through the implementation of an advanced harvesting tool with the use and extension of the open-source software DSpace aiming to collect, process, retrieve, search and browse the harvested metadata records of the selected socioeconomic data sources, in combination with an XML transformation done with a Python app and relevant queries. Several other socioeconomic data sources were explored, while their potential and challenges have been recorded for potential future use. 

FSD co-led the work package on the COVID-19 integration platform that developed the COVID-19 Data Portal as a central hub. FSD contributed expertise in metadata harmonization and participated in developing the tiered indexing approach as well as in developing the common metadata attributes for discovery. Together with ECRIN, FSD studied strategies for cross-metadata mappings between clinical research data and social sciences data, and proposed strategies to proceed with implementing common search mechanisms for ECRIN and CESSDA metadata.

These efforts are detailed in several project outputs, including:

• D8.3 BY-COVID Long Term Sustainability Plan,

• D2.1 - Initial data and metadata harmonisation at domain level to enable fast responses to COVID-19,

• D2.2: Data Access and Transfer across research domains and jurisdictions,

• D2.4 Report on data sources discovery and integration for enabling data use and re-use in response to future outbreaks,

• D3.1 Metadata standards,

• D3.3.1 COVID-19 Data Portal and D3.3.2 COVID-19 Data Portal

Cross-domain collaboration

CESSDA Service Providers also drove cross-domain collaboration with DANS  co-organising the “BY-COVID Spring 23 Use Cases Workshop: Integration of socioeconomic data in observational studies on vaccine effectiveness” and the “BY-COVID Spring 24 Baseline Use Case Workshop”, as well as with contributions in the Common Data Model Specification for the BY-COVID Baseline use case and  the integration of socioeconomic data in observational studies using a prototyped workflow standard to federated population health research.

Raising Awareness Through Engagement, Training and Dissemination

Throughout the project, CESSDA partners (EKKE, ADP, DANS) promoted the importance of socioeconomic data in addressing pandemics. Their engagement and training activities are outlined in the final reports, D6.1 Stakeholder Engagement Report and D6.2 Training efforts report. Highlights include EKKE’s contribution to the implementation of “The BY-COVID Fest,” a face to face event hosting two parallel streams, the training stream on Data sharing and reuse under GDPR where ADP held a hands-on session on data anonymisation and FSD presented possibilities to make sensitive data FAIR, and the IDTk contentathon bringing together data users and producers working with sensitive data.CESSDA partners contributed to several sections in the Infectious Disesases Toolkit (IDTk). Videos and presentations from Data management events addressing also interdisciplinary challenges are available through BY-COVID training materials page. 

Meanwhile, ČSDA supported outreach and dissemination activities by producing information material such as the Socioeconomic data in cross-disciplinary infectious disease research [leaflet] and actively participating in relevant conferences to raise awareness within the SSH research community. FSD co-organised Discoverability hackathons to support the COVID-19 Data Portal sources in providing metadata for the Portal. 

The CESSDA team has also contributed to the project’s dissemination activities, such as the publication of “Beyond COVID - how the BY-COVID project is increasing European pandemic preparedness”. 

Through these collective efforts, CESSDA and its partners significantly contributed to Europe’s readiness for future health challenges. The BY-COVID project has been instrumental in advancing data integration, fostering cross-sector collaboration, and engaging stakeholders in critical training—all of which are vital for a resilient public health infrastructure.