Improving the FAIRness of Health Studies in Germany: The German Central Health Study Hub COVID-19

Abstract

The German Central Health Study Hub COVID-19 is an online service that offers bundled access to COVID-19 related studies conducted in Germany. It combines metadata and other information of epidemiologic, public health and clinical studies into a single data repository for FAIR data access. In addition to study characteristics the system also allows easy access to study documents, as well as instruments for data collection. Study metadata and survey instruments are decomposed into individual data items and semantically enriched to ease the findability. Data from existing clinical trial registries (DRKS, clinicaltrails.gov and WHO ICTRP) are merged with epidemiological and public health studies manually collected and entered. More than 850 studies are listed as of September 2021.