VirDB: Crowdsourced Database for Evaluation of Dynamical Viral Infection Models

Background: Open science is an emerging movement underlining the importance of transparent, high quality research where results can be verified and reused by others. However, one of the biggest problems in replicating experiments is the lack of access to the data used by the authors. This problem also occurs during mathematical modeling of a viral infections. It is a process that can provide valuable insights into viral activity or into a drug’s mechanism of action when conducted correctly. Objective: We present the VirDB database (virdb.cs.put.poznan.pl), which has two primary objectives. First, it is a tool that enables collecting data on viral infections that could be used to develop new dynamic models of infections using the FAIR data sharing principles. Second, it allows storing references to descriptions of viral infection models, together with their evaluation results. Methods: To facilitate the fast population of database and the ease of exchange of scientific data, we decided to use crowdsourcing for collecting data. Such approach has already been proved to be very successful in projects such as Wikipedia. Conclusion: VirDB builds on the concepts and recommendations of Open Science and shares data using the FAIR principles. Thanks to this storing data required for designing and evaluating models of viral infections which can be freely available on the Internet.