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Michael Markie, Publisher at F1000, and Robert Kiley, Head of Open Research, Wellcome, introduce us to Wellcome Open Research’s latest addition – the ALSPAC Gateway.

Today we are excited to announce the ALSPAC Gateway on Wellcome Open Research, a new collaboration that aims to enhance data access and reuse from a world-leading birth cohort study. Based at the University of Bristol, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), also known as Children of the 90s, is a birth cohort study that receives core funding from Wellcome, the MRC and the University of Bristol. It is the most detailed study of its kind in the world providing the international research community with a rich resource for the study of the environmental and genetic factors that affect a person’s health and development.

The ALSPAC-Wellcome Open Research pilot

ALSPAC is run as a resource for the research community; each year, hundreds of researchers from across the globe access data and samples from the cohort. Funding provides the core service for the resource, however providing support and expertise to inform individual projects and researchers for data access and provision comes at a financial cost to researchers. Once data has been retrieved, a researcher can access their selected data and apply it to their own work. Currently, data is made available to the researcher through a managed access mechanism.  Though this process will remain unchanged, under this new pilot we are encouraging researchers to describe the data they have obtained and to publish this on Wellcome Open Research.

Part of Wellcome’s mission is to encourage open research, which includes the sharing of data, code and materials to ensure the research and resources have maximal impact. The creation of the ALSPAC Gateway will provide a dedicated area for all researchers, not just those funded by Wellcome, who have accessed ALSPAC data to publish their datasets and make them open to the wider community. These datasets will be published as a Data Note, providing succinct descriptions of research datasets, with details of why and how the data were created. These data notes are then peer-reviewed.  Reviewers of Data Notes are asked to address the following questions:

• Is the rationale for creating the dataset(s) clearly described?
• Are the protocols appropriate and is the work technically sound?
• Are sufficient details of methods and materials provided to allow replication by others?
• Are the datasets clearly presented in a useable and accessible format?

The first two ALSPAC Data Notes published in the gateway describe data related to the exposure of infection of 5, 7, 11 and 15-year-old children and rare oral health data collected on individuals at multiple time-points.

The ALSPAC gateway will also be the home for any research articles published specifically by Wellcome-funded researchers with results based upon data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children study.

What do we hope to achieve?

This pilot project is all about making data more accessible and enabling the wider research community to reuse rich datasets which they couldn’t do before. We hope researchers who are already using ALSPAC data go the extra step and provide citable, peer-reviewed descriptions of datasets, which could be reused and built upon in other studies. Success will then ultimately come with these newly accessible datasets being found by other research groups and used in ways to further their own research.

Principal Investigator of ALSPAC, Professor Nic Timpson, noted that:

“This is an exceptional opportunity for ALSPAC and our valued collaborators to get data, methods and papers out to the wider research community. Our ambition is to build on the reputation of ALSPAC as an accessible resource by using Wellcome Open Research as a portal to data access and the gateway as a forum for showing this and exciting research.”

As well as collaborating with ALSPAC to make more data available through data notes, we also want to extend this opportunity to other researchers and resources that receive Wellcome funding for longitudinal population studies (LPS). If you are interested in exploring something similar, then please do contact us at info@wellcomeopenreseach.org.