FAIR computational workflows for UK life science.
The Methods Commons is building UK national infrastructure for Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable computational workflows, bringing the teams behind Galaxy, Nextflow and WorkflowHub together to join up siloed UK workflow provision into a single, standards-based service.
About the programme Exemplar Use CasesThe programme
The Methods Commons (MC) is a two-year, UKRI/BioFAIR-funded programme to build a UK national infrastructure for FAIR computational workflows in the life sciences. Led by Carole Goble (University of Manchester) with partners at the Earlham Institute and Seqera, it draws on 20+ years of running Europe’s shared workflow services to join up the UK’s currently siloed workflow provision into one standards-based environment.
It is designed as a commons: a federated, cooperatively-governed shared resource that partners and institutions build together. Diverse workflow systems interoperate, users get reproducible results on infrastructure they don’t have locally, and workflow developers get credit and reuse for their FAIR contributions.
Building blocks
Scalable execution infrastructure
A national Galaxy instance, an enterprise Seqera/Nextflow platform and JupyterLab on AWS, built on standard APIs (GA4GH, Conda, RO-Crate).
Workflow discovery
WorkflowHub as the single access point for finding, sharing and reusing workflows across languages, hosting a curated BioFAIR Workflow Collection of endorsed, canonical workflows.
Secure collaboration
A Shared Project Space for private, access-controlled data and results, with Workflow Run RO-Crate provenance, foreshadowing the future BioFAIR Data Commons.
Community mobilisation
A tiered Concierge Service, a quality-assuring Workflow Observatory, and a Knowledge Hub, supporting everyone from no-code biologists to expert developers.
A fifth strand, operational excellence, embeds governance, playbooks and standardised APIs (and pathways for agentic AI) across the whole workflow lifecycle. Read more about the objectives.
The partnership
Three partners each lead the platform they already run internationally: the University of Manchester (WorkflowHub, RO-Crate, the Shared Project Space and Observatory), the Earlham Institute (Galaxy and cloud infrastructure), and Seqera (Nextflow and community). Together they originated Taverna, CWL, myExperiment and WorkflowHub, operate Galaxy at scale, and founded Nextflow and nf-core.
Part of BioFAIR
The Methods Commons is one spoke of the wider BioFAIR programme, a BioCommons infrastructure for UK life science, alongside the emerging Data Commons and People Commons. The Shared Project Space and its RO-Crate provenance are a first step towards that connected whole.