Software containers are a key element in the frame of Open Science & Open Source which is strongly supported and advocated by ELIXIR. Software containers guarantee data provenance when described as part of scientific workflows and are an important element towards reproducibility. This study is divided into three work-packages that complement each other:

• WP1: Maintain and improve biocontainers infrastructure
• WP2: Developing an integrated “Tools platform Ecosystem”
• WP3: Fostering and evolving community participation and community workflows,

and aims to provide containerised tools and state-of-the-art benchmarked workflows available in Galaxy for scientific communities. This implies integrating data repositories, tools and training material. The provided workflows and tools will be curated to a high standard, rendered FAIR, and follow agreed standards within ELIXIR and by initiatives like GA4GH and EOSC.

This project is part of the ELIXIR Tools platform tasks for the 2019-2023 Scientific programme. Eight ELIXIR Nodes are involved: ELIXIR Spain (Salvador Capella, Josep Gelpi), ELIXIR Germany (Bjorn Gruning), EMBL-EBI (Yasset Perz-Riverol), ELIXIR Belgium (Frederik Coppens), ELIXIR Denmark (Piotr Chmura, Jon Ison), ELIXIR France (Herve Menager, Olivier Sallou), ELIXIR Italy (Giacomo Tartari) and ELIXIR Norway (Matus Kalas, Abdulrahman Azab, Kjetil Klepper, Kjell Petersen).