The programme
The BioFAIR Methods Commons (MC) is a two-year, UKRI/BioFAIR-funded programme to build a UK national infrastructure for FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) computational workflows in the life sciences. Led by Carole Goble (University of Manchester) with partners at the Earlham Institute and Seqera, the consortium brings together the teams behind Galaxy, Nextflow and the WorkflowHub registry. Building on 20+ years of experience running Europe’s shared workflow services, it joins up the UK’s currently siloed workflow provision into a single, standards-based environment.
Goals and ambitions
The MC’s strategic goal is to establish and operate standards-based, user-driven technical infrastructure; to engage and onboard the UK research community; and to put in place the processes needed for sustainable operation, with FAIR practice embedded throughout.
The underlying ambition is a federated, cooperatively-governed commons that partners and institutions build together, where 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.
Objectives
1. Scalable execution infrastructure
A national Galaxy instance, an enterprise-grade Seqera/Nextflow platform, and JupyterLab (with containerised support for Snakemake, R and more) on AWS, built on standard APIs (GA4GH, Conda, RO-Crate).
2. Workflow discovery
WorkflowHub as the single access point for discovering, reusing and sharing workflows across languages, hosting a curated BioFAIR Workflow Collection of endorsed, canonical workflows.
3. Secure collaboration
A Shared Project Space for private, access-controlled management of user data and results, using Workflow Run RO-Crate provenance, foreshadowing the future BioFAIR Data Commons.
4. Community mobilisation
Scaling support from no-code biologists to expert developers, through:
- Concierge Service: a tiered, user-led support model covering the whole workflow lifecycle (design, selecting existing workflows, evaluation, debugging), from intensive co-development with Exemplar Use Cases and premium support for complex projects, through self-service onboarding to lighter-touch community outreach.
- CRM and direct engagement: tracking each user and project as a coherent journey rather than isolated tickets, backed by clinics, hackathons, a User Forum and Club, and Champions, with AI agents increasingly automating routine support.
- Workflow Observatory: the quality-assurance layer built into WorkflowHub that curates, tests, benchmarks and FAIR-vets workflows (using tools such as LifeMonitor and the ELIXIR FAIR Checker), issuing quality indicators and endorsement decisions for the BioFAIR Workflow Collection.
- Knowledge Hub: curated guides, playbooks and training materials supporting self-service and onboarding.
5. Operational excellence
Governance, playbooks, an operations handbook and standardised APIs that embed FAIR practice across the workflow lifecycle, with clear pathways for onboarding further workflow systems and agentic AI.
Delivery
Delivery is a two-year, two-phase MVP, organised as eight work packages spanning platform DevOps (core infrastructure, workflow execution, the Shared Project Space, the Commons Hub/registry) and community work (workflow collection curation, concierge support, community engagement and governance).
- Phase 1 (months 1–12): stand up core services, launch the concierge model, and co-design intensively with a small set of workflow-ready Exemplar Use Cases and BioFAIR Fellows to establish features and processes.
- Phase 2 (months 12–24): shift to feedback-driven feature development, operational consolidation, broader recruitment, integration with other BioFAIR spokes, and support for additional workflow systems (Snakemake, R) and agentic AI.
- Beyond (Year 3+): transition to a lower-friction “MC-as-a-service” mode, with users interacting mainly through documented APIs and catalogues.
Progress is tracked against milestones (for example, cloud/IaC foundations and single sign-on by month 6; Galaxy and Nextflow instances with most Exemplar Use Cases onboarded, an MVP RO-Crate catalogue and a Knowledge Hub by month 12) and against KPIs covering usage growth, community adoption, training uptake and FAIR compliance.