Galaxy is an open-source platform that allows researchers to analyze and share scientific data using interoperable APIs and various user-friendly web-based interfaces. The Galaxy project was launched in 2005 and has since become a powerful framework for researchers across a wide range of research fields, including *omics, biodiversity, machine learning, cheminformatics, NLP, material science, and climate research.
The European Galaxy server, located in the compute center of the University of Freiburg, is a flagship project of the German Network of Bioinformatics infrastructure (de.NBI) and part of multiple SFBs and NFDI consortia. It is one of the biggest ELIXIR services and the preferred gateway for scientific computing of multiple European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) projects. Since 2022 the European Galaxy community is officially part of EOSC with its own project called EuroScienceGateway.
One of the key features of the Galaxy platform is its emphasis on transparency, reproducibility, and reusability. Galaxy is a multi-user environment which facilitates the sharing of e.g. tools, workflows, notebooks, visualizations, and data with others. This makes it particularly easy to reproduce results in order to verify their correctness and enable other researchers to build upon them in future studies. In addition to reproducibility, the Galaxy project places a strong emphasis on research data management (RDM). The platform includes tools for data import, organization, sharing, annotation, and export. This allows researchers to work with large datasets without the need for local storage infrastructure. The project encourages researchers to share their data and analysis workflows with the wider scientific community, with the aim of accelerating scientific discovery and innovation.
The Galaxy project includes a flourishing training network (GTN) that provides more than 300 tutorials for researchers, software developers, system administrators, data stewards and data scientists in different languages. This includes hands-on tutorials, example datasets, e-learning material, videos, and workshops that are royalty-free and available to researchers around the world. The training network is supported by a global community that contributes to the development of the Galaxy ecosystem and provides support to new users. Since its inception, this training platform has thrived, with the number of tutorials and contributors growing rapidly, and the range of topics extending far beyond life sciences.