*2.4.1 The research infrastructure*

The EU-OPENSCREEN infrastructure provides open-access to compound libraries, assay development and screening facilities, and medicinal chemistry and informatics platforms. It provides training and serves as a platform for industry engagement.

## *2.4.1.1 Compound collection*

The EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection is a diversity library, which has been designed in a collaborative effort of several partner sites. The library is jointly used by affiliated EU-OPENSCREEN partner sites for primary screening against biological targets solicited from external researchers who developed the appropriate assays. During the design of the library, 100,000 commercially available

**119**

projects.

*2.4.1.2 Database*

*Accelerating Chemical Tool Discovery by Academic Collaborative Models*

compounds were selected, with an emphasis on chemical stability, absence of reactive compounds, screening-compliant physico-chemical properties, and maximal diversity/coverage of chemical space. Furthermore, EU-OPENSCREEN crowdsources compounds from external chemists worldwide, in a federated approach through its national chemical biology networks. This collection of academic compounds will, over time, add increasing uniqueness to the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection. The ambitious goal is to gather up to 40,000 compounds over the next years and to realize the vision of a truly European compound collection. In this context, the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection will be dynamic and expanding. In analogy to the 'FAIR' (FAIR stands for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) data principles (described below), structural compound information and quality control data will be available online in an interoperable format (interoperability), unique identifier codes for each compound will be employed (findability), quality control will ensure the identity and purity of the compounds (reproducibility), and their distribution partner sites where they are accessible to external scientists and used in screening projects (accessibility). All compounds of the collections are carefully characterized and annotated for basic physico-chemical (e.g. solubility, light absorbance and fluorescence) and biological properties (e.g. cytotoxicity, antibiotic activity) by 'profiling' them in a standard panel of assays. These bioprofiling data increase the reliability and reproducibility of screening results, and identify compounds with properties that could potentially perturb specific bioassay read-out technologies (e.g. auto-fluorescence, luciferase inhibition, etc.) in order to reduce false-positive results. For chemists who provide compounds to be incorporated in the compound collection, these profiling data are an important incentive, in addition to the bioactivity data from the screening

The jointly used compound collection is stored centrally by the Compound Collection Management Facility (CCMF) in Berlin, Germany, and aliquots are distributed to the affiliated EU-OPENSCREEN partner sites, which are located in the eight EU-OPENSCREEN member countries. The CCMF is responsible for the acquisition, selection, maintenance and storage of the central collection and quality-controls of the compounds. The CCMF provides the screening and bioprofiling sites with copies of the compound collection (including, where necessary,

In many cases, primary screening data—even from publicly funded programs are not openly accessible by the scientific community. While private organizations, contract research organizations (CROs) and many public-private partnerships do not reveal data on a routine basis, EU-OPENSCREEN is committed to maximizing the re-use and impact of generated bioactivity data for the benefit of the wider scientific community. Therefore, EU-OPENSCREEN's ECBD adheres to the FAIR principles [23] and is closely linked to the ChEMBL [24] database, which will raise the discoverability and re-use of EU-OPENSCREEN's data. Via ECBD and ChEMBL, database users will be drawn from across the global biological and chemical science communities, both from academia and industry. Together with other European life sciences-research infrastructures, EU-OPENSCREEN partners also contribute towards the optimization of technological implementation, integration and interoperability of data and tools within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and participate in the Horizon 2020-funded 'EOSC-Life' project (www.eosc-life.eu/). Another initiative, to which the EU-OPENSCREEN partner

cherry-picking for confirmatory and counter-screening activities).

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91138*

#### *Accelerating Chemical Tool Discovery by Academic Collaborative Models DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91138*

compounds were selected, with an emphasis on chemical stability, absence of reactive compounds, screening-compliant physico-chemical properties, and maximal diversity/coverage of chemical space. Furthermore, EU-OPENSCREEN crowdsources compounds from external chemists worldwide, in a federated approach through its national chemical biology networks. This collection of academic compounds will, over time, add increasing uniqueness to the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection. The ambitious goal is to gather up to 40,000 compounds over the next years and to realize the vision of a truly European compound collection. In this context, the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection will be dynamic and expanding. In analogy to the 'FAIR' (FAIR stands for findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability) data principles (described below), structural compound information and quality control data will be available online in an interoperable format (interoperability), unique identifier codes for each compound will be employed (findability), quality control will ensure the identity and purity of the compounds (reproducibility), and their distribution partner sites where they are accessible to external scientists and used in screening projects (accessibility). All compounds of the collections are carefully characterized and annotated for basic physico-chemical (e.g. solubility, light absorbance and fluorescence) and biological properties (e.g. cytotoxicity, antibiotic activity) by 'profiling' them in a standard panel of assays. These bioprofiling data increase the reliability and reproducibility of screening results, and identify compounds with properties that could potentially perturb specific bioassay read-out technologies (e.g. auto-fluorescence, luciferase inhibition, etc.) in order to reduce false-positive results. For chemists who provide compounds to be incorporated in the compound collection, these profiling data are an important incentive, in addition to the bioactivity data from the screening projects.

The jointly used compound collection is stored centrally by the Compound Collection Management Facility (CCMF) in Berlin, Germany, and aliquots are distributed to the affiliated EU-OPENSCREEN partner sites, which are located in the eight EU-OPENSCREEN member countries. The CCMF is responsible for the acquisition, selection, maintenance and storage of the central collection and quality-controls of the compounds. The CCMF provides the screening and bioprofiling sites with copies of the compound collection (including, where necessary, cherry-picking for confirmatory and counter-screening activities).
