Automating FAIR Training Metadata Pipelines: Bioconductor into TeSS and Beyond (BITS)

The Institute for Research Software runs the Research Software Maintenance Fund, supported by the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure programme, offering £4.8 million to support and sustain key research software, ensuring it remains reliable and accessible. This initiative not only funds vital pieces of the research ecosystem but help us understand how we can effectively provide the support that research software needs to reduce technical debt and grow engagement.

Round 2 awarded approximately £2.73 million to 19 projects assessed on their vision and potential impact, feasibility and approach, and capability to deliver. The portfolio spans research supported by all seven UK research councils and includes software written in languages such as Python, R, C++, Fortran, and JavaScript.

Automating FAIR Training Metadata Pipelines: Bioconductor into TeSS and Beyond (BITS)

Team: Phil Reed, Project Lead; Carole Goble, Project Co-Lead; Finn Bacall, Research Software Engineer; and Munazah Andrabi, Research and Innovation Associate (University of Manchester). Maria Doyle, International Project Co-Lead (University of Limerick).

TeSS (Training e‑Support System) is a UK‑led ELIXIR training registry for life‑science research. It is a mature, well-established online service used across the UK and internationally, including Europe, Canada, and Australia. TeSS brings together information about training materials and events from many sources into one place, helping researchers, trainers, and students easily find relevant, up‑to‑date resources. It currently aggregates over 3,400 training materials and more than 15,000 training events (including historical records) from a large and diverse set of international content providers.

TeSS plays an important role in supporting research by making training more visible and accessible across scientific domains, institutes, and portals. It helps users discover learning opportunities and supports organisations delivering training. The platform is widely used through the ELIXIR Training Platform and by international partners such as PaN‑Training (Photon and Neutron Science), Digital Research Skills Australasia (DReSA), TAXILA (Netherlands), SciLifeLab (Sweden), and Explora (Canada). Building on this strong foundation, TeSS is now being leveraged within the recently funded TeSSHub4EOSC project to support the development of a decentralised system of training registries for European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) nodes and science clusters. The TeSS Platform also enables community contributions and improvements through tools such as GitHub and community engagement activities.

Bioconductor is a widely used open‑source ecosystem for analysing genomics and biomedical data, with strong uptake across UK research and training programmes. However, training materials for Bioconductor are currently spread across many websites and platforms (such as GitHub, Zenodo, YouTube, and course providers). Because these resources are not automatically collected by TeSS, they can be difficult to find, and significant manual effort is required to curate them.

This project will address this problem by improving how TeSS gathers (or “ingests”) training information. It will develop a standardised, automated way to collect Bioconductor training materials and events, using internationally recognised metadata standards (Bioschemas and JSON‑LD). Rather than creating new features, this work focuses on maintaining and improving existing systems to make them more reliable, scalable, and sustainable. Bioconductor will act as a pilot case for improving how TeSS supports large, community‑driven training ecosystems.

The project will benefit UK research by:

  • making important training materials easier to find and access,
  • reducing the manual effort required to maintain training records,
  • supporting collaboration between training providers and infrastructure platforms,
  • enabling a feedback loop where contributors improve their content based on platform validation,
  • and aligning with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open research principles.

By improving how training resources are collected and described, this project will strengthen the long‑term sustainability of TeSS and provide a reusable approach that can be adopted by other research communities.