(REFERENCE: PHA4GE/2021-02)

Public Health Alliance for Genomic Epidemiology (PHA4GE) (www.pha4ge.org) is a global consortium established in 2019, to ensure a rapid global genomic-driven public health response to disease outbreaks. Our community includes partners and stakeholders such as funders, public health organizations at international, regional and national levels; and non-specialist individuals across the world. The consortium has Working Groups, that are made up of representative individuals, from the growing list of over 30 partner organizations. These Working Groups drive various activities to fulfil the consortium’s mission. Our mission is to establish global consensus on data standards, document and share best practices, improve the availability of critical bioinformatic tools and resources and advocate for greater openness, interoperability, accessibility and reproducibility in public health bioinformatics.

Application for small grants: Ethics and Data Sharing Projects

The PHA4GE Ethics and Data-Sharing Working Group aims to establish, facilitate and support an inclusive, diverse, equitable and collaborative ethics community that can promote ethics research, develop ethics training and increase capacity for informed, practical and agile solutions to high priority ethics and data sharing issues.

The PHA4GE Ethics Working Group hosts an online Ethics and Data Sharing Platform to encourage conversations and collaborations between ethicists and other researchers with an interest in research ethics, data governance and related topics. The platform provides a forum for discussion; Q&A for sharing questions, solutions and guidance; collaborations and other activities, all aimed at gaining insights and solutions into ethical issues in research. Through this forum the ethics and genomic epidemiology community will support new research, address current issues, and train the next generation of ethicists and researchers by actively supporting and including young researchers in platform activities. The PHA4GE Ethics Platform is intended to be a safe, respectful, collegial, inclusive and equitable space that advances ethics research and nurtures researchers from a wide variety of different professional backgrounds and career stages.

The PHA4GE Ethics and Data Sharing Working Group Terms of Reference can be found at https://ethics-datasharing.pha4ge.org under the Ethics & Data Sharing tab at the top of the page.

1.2  The funding

This funding is available for small grants to complete projects initiated and conducted on the PHA4GE Ethics and Data Sharing Platform. All proposed projects must respect current COVID-19 safety protocols.

The total amount available for this programme is USD 50 000. The maximum amount that may be requested for a project is USD 5000, and this must include an open access publication fee.

The PHA4GE and the Ethics and Data Sharing WG reserve the right to not disburse the full amount, and close the call once funding has been disbursed to successful applications.

1.3  Types of projects to be funded:

The projects MUST be initiated on the PHA4GE Ethics and Data Sharing Platform and the project collaborative progress and ongoing discussions and communications will be assessed on the platform before disbursing payments.

Examples of successful types of projects might include, but are not limited to:

• Writing systematic reviews or scoping papers
• Building frameworks or guidelines for ethical and data sharing challenges
• Running an online workshop which develops guidelines, publications, tools
• Running a survey and analysing the results
• Building tools that support ethics and data sharing
• Designing and implementing a training workshop (online, due to COVID-19 restrictions) 
• Developing a curriculum for ethics/data sharing training

1.4  Disbursement of funds for successful applications: 

The funding will be disbursed on completion of the project, as approved by the PHA4GE Ethics and Data  Sharing Working Group, except where consumable and operational costs are required to undertake the  project in which case this amount will be provided on award, with the remainder provided on completion of  the project.  

All projects funded must provide for assessment a submission-ready manuscript to the PHA4GE Ethics and  Data Sharing WG with supporting materials where appropriate by 1 September 2021.  

A short (~500 words) monthly update on progress must be provided on the platform project thread by the  end of each calendar month.  

The funded project must result in a peer-reviewed publication of sufficient quality to be published in a  reputable Open Access peer-reviewed journal indexed in PubMed. 

Any tools or research outputs generated as part of the project must be made openly available in a suitable  online repository and via the PHA4GE Ethics and Data Sharing platform (e.g. GitHub, Figshare).  

At the end of the funding period, a short final written report will be required from awardees, which will  describe challenges and successes of the project and the experience of using the PHA4GE Ethics and Data  Sharing platform to conduct the project. A template will be provided for this report when it is required.