BIOSCAN is the name for the current sprint of global DNA barcoding activity under the aegis of iBOL. Within the context of the Biodiversity Genomics Europe project, BIOSCAN Europe is the name of the activity stream focusing on technology development, capacity building, and production and publishing of data - all to improve DNA barcoding in Europe. This GitHub organization is geared towards the first activity: technology development. In parallel, capacity building is organised through the establishment of an iBOL Europe node, while data production and publishing happen in protected labs, data stores, and code repositories.
The main area where technology development is needed is that of bioinformatics pipeline development. This includes the development and publishing of pipelines for target list generation, genome skimming, QA/QC of the resulting barcodes, processing of metabarcoding data, and reference library curation. Although the development of each of these components currently takes place in disparate repositories, there is a shared need to adopt best practices and structure the outcomes such that they can be reported to the funders (i.e. they comply with OSS requirements), are in line with the activities of our consortium partners (i.e. are WorkFlowHub compliant), and obtain FAIR digital object representations. This GitHub organisation is intended to facilitate addressing that need by bringing code bases together for mutual inspiration.