The 12th ELIXIR All Hands meeting was held in Lyon, France, from June 08 to 10, 2026. The European Galaxy team members from University of Freiburg attended this meeting, which brought together the European bioinformatics community to exchange ideas and align strategies across ELIXIR nodes and partner organizations. Some of the key Galaxy-related highlights are summarized below.
The opening keynote highlighted the role of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) in providing open access to biodiversity data and enabling large-scale ecological and environmental research. During the meeting, the ELIXIR and the GBIF signed a Statement of Intent to strengthen collaboration between the two organizations, particularly in the areas of data sharing, interoperability, and training. This collaboration aims to enhance the accessibility and usability of biodiversity data for researchers across Europe and beyond. For the Galaxy community, this is particularly relevant as Galaxy already supports biodiversity analyses through dedicated tools, tutorials, and workflows that integrate GBIF data. The Galaxy Training Network, for example, provides training materials demonstrating how GBIF occurrence records can be accessed and analysed within Galaxy, illustrating how FAIR biodiversity resources can be combined with reproducible computational workflows. This close alignment between GBIF’s open data infrastructure and Galaxy’s reproducible analysis platform highlights the growing opportunities for biodiversity researchers to perform scalable, transparent analyses using interoperable European research infrastructures.
The mini-symposium on the ELIXIR Compute Platform showcased recent progress in integrating national and thematic compute services with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), EuroHPC, and emerging AI Factories. Several presentations highlighted how interoperable services, common authentication, and federated resource provisioning are enabling researchers to access distributed computing resources through a consistent user experience. A joint presentation demonstrated several Galaxy onboarding use cases for the EOSC EU Node (EEN). Demonstrated Galaxy integrations included EOSC Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) login, deployment of single-user Galaxy instances on EEN virtual machines, integration of the Galaxy workflow catalogue, and the use of Pulsar to provision EEN compute resources for the usegalaxy.eu server. The presentation also showcased “Bring Your Own Data” capabilities for connecting external data repositories, illustrating how Galaxy can provide seamless access to federated authentication, compute, workflows, and data.
The community-driven FAIR assessment of training materials, tools and workflows workshop brought together developers and infrastructure providers to identify common approaches for describing and evaluating scientific software. Galaxy team members contributed to the Tools and Workflows breakout discussions, which focused on improving interoperability between software registries and workflow platforms.The discussions centred on harmonising metadata between resources such as WorkflowHub and bio.tools, defining practical FAIR assessment criteria for tools and workflows, and improving the exchange of persistent identifiers and provenance information across infrastructures. These priorities closely align with ongoing Galaxy developments, where rich tool metadata, WorkflowHub integration, and standards-based workflow descriptions help make Galaxy analyses more discoverable, reusable, and interoperable within the broader ELIXIR ecosystem.
The workshop on onboarding ELIXIR-on-Cloud in EOSC presented a modular architecture for federated life science computing based on the GA4GH Cloud APIs (TRS, DRS, WES, and TES), enabling workflows to be executed securely across distributed infrastructures. Galaxy featured as one of the primary workflow platforms within this ecosystem, with demonstrations showing how Galaxy Pulsar integrates with federated execution services to bring analysis to distributed datasets and HPC resources. The workshop also highlighted ongoing work towards production-ready federated workflow execution, interoperable cloud services, and secure analysis environments for sensitive biomedical data.
The workshop on standardized tool and infrastructure usage metrics presented a common reporting framework and prototype dashboard for collecting privacy-preserving information on tool execution and resource usage across ELIXIR services. The approach aims to support infrastructure planning, resource optimisation, and recognition of tool developers and compute providers. Galaxy played a central role as the first implementation of the proposed reporting framework, with usegalaxy.be providing real-world execution reports that informed both the reporting schema and dashboard development. Discussions highlighted that the wider Galaxy Europe infrastructure is already collecting detailed tool and resource usage metrics, providing a valuable foundation for community-wide reporting across Galaxy servers. These data will also support the upcoming ESG4Stars project, where standardized usage metrics will be used to quantify energy and resource consumption, optimize workflow execution, and improve the environmental sustainability of large-scale scientific computing.
Across the meeting, a recurring theme was the increasing integration of Galaxy with the broader ELIXIR ecosystem, from FAIR workflows and federated execution environments to biodiversity data analysis and standardized infrastructure metrics. Beyond the workshops and talks, the team also engaged in poster sessions and discussions with members of other ELIXIR Nodes, providing valuable insights into ongoing projects, strengthening collaborations, and fostering new synergies within the ELIXIR community.