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. 2025 May 23;12(1):851.
doi: 10.1038/s41597-025-05147-w.

FAIR assessment of Disease Maps fosters open science and scientific crowdsourcing in systems biomedicine

Irina Balaur  1 , Danielle Welter  2 , Adrien Rougny  2 , Esther Thea Inau  3 , Alexander Mazein  2 , Soumyabrata Ghosh  2 , Reinhard Schneider  2 , Dagmar Waltemath  3 , Marek Ostaszewski  4 , Venkata Satagopam  2
Affiliations

FAIR assessment of Disease Maps fosters open science and scientific crowdsourcing in systems biomedicine

Irina Balaur et al. Sci Data. .

Abstract

The Disease Maps Project focuses on the development of disease-specific comprehensive structured knowledge repositories supporting translational medicine research. These disease maps require continuous interdisciplinary collaboration and should be reusable and interoperable. Adhering to the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles enhances the utility of such digital assets. We used the RDA FAIR Data Maturity Model and assessed the FAIRness of the Molecular Interaction NEtwoRk VisuAlization (MINERVA) Platform. MINERVA is a standalone webserver that allows users to manage, explore and analyse disease maps and their related data manually or programmatically. We exemplify the FAIR assessment on the Parkinson's Disease Map (PD map) and the COVID-19 Disease Map, which are large-scale projects under the umbrella of the Disease Maps Project, aiming to investigate molecular mechanisms of the Parkinson's disease and SARS-CoV-2 infection, respectively. We discuss the FAIR features supported by the MINERVA Platform and we outline steps to further improve the MINERVA FAIRness and to better connect this resource to other ongoing scientific initiatives supporting FAIR in computational systems biomedicine.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing interests: RS is a co-founder and a shareholder of MEGENO S.A. and ITTM S.A. VS is a co-founder and a shareholder of ITTM S.A. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.

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    Balaur I, Nickerson DP, Welter D, Wodke JAH, Ancien F, Gebhardt T, Grouès V, Hermjakob H, König M, Radde N, Rougny A, Schneider R, Malik-Sheriff RS, Shiferaw KB, Stefan M, Satagopam V, Waltemath D. Balaur I, et al. bioRxiv [Preprint]. 2025 Mar 24:2025.03.21.644517. doi: 10.1101/2025.03.21.644517. bioRxiv. 2025. PMID: 40196669 Free PMC article. Preprint.

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