The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in 2021.

The European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) maintains a comprehensive range of freely available and up-to-date molecular data resources, which includes over 40 resources covering every major data type in the life sciences. This year's service update for EMBL-EBI includes new resources, PGS Catalog and AlphaFold DB, and updates on existing resources, including the COVID-19 Data Platform, trRosetta and RoseTTAfold models introduced in Pfam and InterPro, and the launch of Genome Integrations with Function and Sequence by UniProt and Ensembl. Furthermore, we highlight projects through which EMBL-EBI has contributed to the development of community-driven data standards and guidelines, including the Recommended Metadata for Biological Images (REMBI), and the BioModels Reproducibility Scorecard. Training is one of EMBL-EBI's core missions and a key component of the provision of bioinformatics services to users: this year's update includes many of the improvements that have been developed to EMBL-EBI's online training offering.

European initiative towards quality standards in education and training for discovery, development and use of medicines.

This position paper recommends a set of standards for quality assessment of continuing professional development (CPD) for medicines research and development (R&D). We have developed these standards to help us achieve the education and training goals of the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI; www.imi.europa.eu/), which is developing courses to address the skills gaps in European medicines R&D. The IMI shared standard for course quality will enable professionals in medicines R&D to create a personalized portfolio of education and training that best suits their needs. Individuals already working in the pharmaceutical industry will be able to select modules for study on an as-needs basis, which may be combined to gain a qualification that is recognized throughout Europe. By seeking input from the medicines R&D community, especially professional bodies involved in the career development of biomedical scientists, we hope to initiate the creation of a mutually recognized framework for lifelong learning in medicines R&D. The shared standards call for defined and transparent admission criteria, a predefined set of teaching objectives leading to defined learning outcomes, assessment of the students' achievement, a system for collecting, assessing and addressing feedback, and provision of appropriate and updated reference material. This framework will make it easier for professionals to develop the skills required by industry, and easier for employers to recognize professionals with appropriate skills. It will obviate some of the need for retraining personnel who have already developed appropriate skills in a different setting, thereby saving the industry additional effort. Fulfilment of quality standards by course providers will be made transparent within the IMI's catalogue of courses, on-course (www.on-course.eu), which will be made publicly available during 2012.

Data standards: a call to action.

Access to data is something that every molecular biologist takes for granted nowadays, but data alone is of little use unless it is made available in a useable form through the development and global uptake of data standards. The challenge of standards development has been taken up by grass-roots movements working within several different branches of the biomedical research community. Many of these initiatives are proving extremely successful; for example, the Gene Ontology, which provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the properties of gene products, the Microarray Gene Expression Data Society's standards for describing microarray experiments, and the emerging standards developed by the Proteomics Standards Initiative are gaining broad acceptance. Standards development now faces its greatest ever challenge--the integration of diverse data types to fulfill the goals of systems biology. Now is the time for the communities that are developing these standards, the funding bodies that have invested so heavily in high-throughput data generation, and the publishers of biomedical research papers to cooperate fully to make the goals of integrated data analysis a reality.