About the Portal Epidemiology - France

The “Epidemiology – France” portal is one of the priority initiatives recommended by the Conseil Stratégique des Industries de Santé (CSIS – French Strategic Council for the Health Industries) aimed at accelerating the development of research in the fields of epidemiology and public health and thereby encouraging partnerships between public and private researchers working in this sector. Inserm – Institut thématique Santé Publique (Thematic Public Health Institute) has been put in charge of operating the portal.

This new internet tool offers an online catalog of the principal French health databases that might be useful for the development of research and expertise in public health. Each database listed in the catalogue is described according to its main characteristics: objectives, topics, populations covered, type of data collected, conditions of access to these data, management structure, etc. The presentation of the databases is specially designed to be user friendly, making their contents easy to comprehend. The presentation is general enough to enable description of databases that are very diverse in terms of both their objectives and the methods of data collection.

What types of databases can I find on the "Epidemiologie-France portal" ?

 

The “Epidemiology – France" portal fits squarely with the current trend towards "scientific data sharing"

This new tool fits squarely with a more general trend affecting the life and health sciences sector as a whole: data sharing. The aim is to enable the research community as a whole to benefit from the information available at a given time and to thereby accelerate the production of new knowledge. This approach is particularly valid in the field of public health research, where the production, analysis and comparison of high-quality epidemiological data play a major role in advancing knowledge.

However, any data sharing first assumes upstream sharing of relevant information concerning these data, which may then serve as resources that are available to the research community as a whole. It is this kind of sharing information that the “Epidemiology – France” portal aims to assist.

Objectives of the “Epidemiology – France” portal

The “Epidemiology – France” portal hopes that sharing information on existing databases might encourage the development of original research projects that would rely on using the data that has already been collected. Data sharing may also promote nested studies that involve new research groups adding studies onto existing surveys or cohorts.

Important information concerning this point: the portal does not aim to be the provider of access to data for the purposes of research or expertise procedures.

Instead, it has the more modest ambition of promoting the emergence of new research projects. It is the responsibility of the teams concerned to contact the manager of the database in question in order to agree the terms and conditions for re-exploitation of some or all of the data in the database.

The portal accepts no paid advertising.