The theme of LIFES Annual Conference 2026 is: From reusable data to actual reuse.
The FAIR principles aim at machine-actionable, reusable data. To move from reusability to real reuse, however, more is needed. It requires a FAIR-enabled ecosystem of existing and new infrastructure components, so that data can be found, trusted, and visited by both people and machines.
This year’s conference is therefore about how to achieve proper data publishing and trusted, equitable reuse – for research data as well as the data produced in public-private consortia and in private R&D.
What to expect
A full day of keynotes, live demonstrations, and interactive sessions – showing what already works today and what it will take to scale.
Contributors include: A cross-section of the people shaping FAIR data reuse across research, industry, funding, and policy.
- Karel Luyben – past president EOSC
- Barend Mons – LIFES
- Jildau Bouwman – TNO / LACDR
- Koen Jonkers – European Commission – JRC
- Evangelia Markidou – European Commission – DG CONNECT
- Jean-Claude Burgelman – Frontiers Planet Prize
- Nico van Meeteren – Health~Holland
- Jan Verelst – University of Antwerp
One concrete expression of Beyond Reusable Data is what LIFES members are jointly building as a Living Evidence Engine: an environment in which FAIR Data Trains visit three categories of data – real-world observations, experimental data, and established knowledge – across existing distributed learning platforms, with full privacy and sovereignty. Close to a hundred experts are already collaborating on it, and two or three working demos will be shown at the conference.
It is one way of getting to actual reuse, not the only one – a working illustration of what an ecosystem of professionally supported, FAIR-enabled environments makes possible when they can receive and execute each other’s algorithms.
Practical information
- Date: November 25, 2026
- Location: Poortgebouw, Leiden
- Register via this link
