The partnership
The consortium spans three partners, each owning the platform(s) it already leads internationally:
- University of Manchester: WorkflowHub, RO-Crate, the Shared Project Space and the Observatory.
- Earlham Institute: Galaxy and cloud infrastructure.
- Seqera: Nextflow and community.
It is structured as a “Team-of-Teams”: a Technical DevOps team, a Community/Concierge team, and a Curation & Observatory team, overseen by a Management Board (the Project Lead, Project Co-Leads from each partner, and the Product Owner). The Project Lead also sits on BioFAIR’s central Delivery Team for cross-spoke alignment.
Heritage
The team draws on 20+ years of jointly building FAIR workflow infrastructure: the originators of Taverna, CWL, myExperiment and WorkflowHub (Manchester); core Galaxy developers and operators of the Earlham RPO Galaxy server (Earlham); and the founders of Nextflow and nf-core, now behind the Seqera Platform used by 150+ organisations (Seqera). The same group co-defined the Workflow Run RO-Crate standard and the FAIR principles for workflows, and collectively run long-standing national and international services (WorkflowHub, ELIXIR TeSS, FAIRDOMHub and CyVerse UK) that the Methods Commons builds on.