The NFDI4Health Taskforce Covid-19 initiative was established to increase the FAIRness – Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability – of clinical, epidemiologic and public health studies with a COVID-19 focus and to establish the German Central Health Study Hub Covid-19, a webservice to find for COVID-19 related studies conducted in Germany.
The FAIRDOM-SEEK platform is mainly used as backend to enter and store study-level metadata, as well as documents and other resources of the studies with their metadata and make them publicly accessible via a separate web-frontend. FAIRDOM-SEEK is also used to register data and documents with Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) for creating a perennial identifier and making them finadable in the web, as well as to render them citable.
The study documents and resources stored in the FAIRDOM-SEEK component include study-protocol templates and data dictionaries as well as information on study-metadata structures – such as data models that describe study subjects and their clinical parameters – in addition to treatment outcomes and similar information. Additionally, direct links to primary resources and websites for the studies are included.