BioStudies Database: A Platform for Life Sciences Study Data Dissemination

The BioStudies database is an EMBL-EBI resource, serving as a repository for descriptions of biological studies, providing links to associated data housed in both internal databases and external resources, and accommodating data that do not fit into specialised archives. BioStudies offers mechanisms for defining and implementing metadata guidelines tailored to specific data sources, projects, or emerging communities, and organises datasets into collections. The platform facilitates data acquisition across the entire scientific process lifecycle, supporting data sharing during collaborative projects, data deposition for manuscript submission, and creation of data packages post-publication. Furthermore, BioStudies has assisted various projects in transitioning from legacy data infrastructures by offering sustainable data archival and access services. This article discusses the data collections within BioStudies across these different data lifecycle stages and details the underlying technology developed for this generic data infrastructure. We report on the progress we have made since 2018 when the previous BioStudies article was published. This paper is targeted towards scientists seeking ways to publish heterogenous datasets associated to their manuscripts, data stewards looking to set up data sharing for a new project or data type, data scientists needing large volumes of life sciences data, as well as data management system developers. BioStudies is available at https://ebi.ac.uk/biostudies.