Merge pull request #93 from eScienceLab/patch-20251031

Add RSQKit page, update TeSS page, two news items

Author: PhilReedData

_posts/2025-10-31-eosc-life-sciences-connect-node.md

@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title:  "ELIXIR joins forces to strengthen life science capacity within the European Open Science Cloud"
+date:   2025-10-31 13:00:00 +0000
+categories: announcements elixir eosc
+---
+
+The ELIXIR Consortium, Euro-BioImaging, Instruct-ERIC and EMBL have joined forces to establish the EOSC Life Sciences Connect Node – a candidate European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) node dedicated to improving access to data, tools and workflows across the life sciences.
+
+Following an open call in summer, the Life Science Connect Node was selected as part of the first wave of candidate EOSC nodes. The Node aims to strengthen open science capacity across domains by connecting resources, aligning standards, and supporting FAIR and ethically compliant data sharing.
+
+A series of use cases will showcase the Node’s capabilities, from cross-domain image analysis to federated data storage in structural biology and multi-domain workflows through Galaxy. Together, these examples will highlight how the EOSC Federation can enhance research efficiency and interoperability across Europe.
+
+UK partners involved in ELIXIR will contribute expertise, among others, in data stewardship, workflow interoperability and capacity building through their participation in the broader ELIXIR consortium.
+
+> _“By working together, within the framework of EOSC, we can make an even greater collective contribution to open science”_, said Peter Maccallum, Coordinator of the EOSC Life Sciences Connect Node.
+
+- [Read the full announcement on the ELIXIR Europe website](https://elixir-europe.org/news/EOSC-LSC-MoU). 
+
+[Source: ELIXIR-UK](https://elixiruknode.org/news/2025/eosc-life-sciences-connect-node/)

_posts/2025-10-31-fonda-fall-2025-retreat.md

@@ -0,0 +1,14 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title:  "FONDA Fall 2025 Retreat"
+date:   2025-10-31 12:00:00 +0000
+categories: announcements
+---
+
+FONDA’s members met from 7th to 9th October 2025 in Potsdam for their Fall Retreat. In addition to subproject progress reports, each PhD student presented a poster regarding their thesis topic, and they had two marvelous keynote talks by Carole Goble and Sarah Cohen-Boulakia.
+
+[FONDA](https://fonda.hu-berlin.de/) is Foundations of Workflows for Large-Scale Scientific Data Analysis, based at DFG Collaborative Research Center at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin, Germany. FONDA investigates methods for increasing productivity in the development, execution, and maintenance of Data Analysis Workflows for large scientific data sets. 
+
+![Photograph of Potsdam 2025](/images/posts_images/potsdam-2025.jpg)
+
+[Source](https://fonda.hu-berlin.de/?p=2282)

_products/rsqkit.md

@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+---
+layout: product
+name: rsqkit
+title: RSQKit
+path: rsqkit
+collection: products
+description: Curated best practices, tools and resources for improving the quality of research software
+website: https://everse.software/RSQKit/
+logo: /images/logo/rsqkit.svg
+screenshot: /images/screenshots/sm_rsqkit.png
+---
+
+The framework for research software excellence incorporates aspects involving community curation, quality assessment, and best practices for research software. This collective knowledge is captured in the [Research Software Quality toolkit (RSQKit)](https://everse.software/RSQKit/), a knowledge base to gather and curate expertise that contributes to high-quality software and code across different disciplines.
+
+
+## eScience Lab contributions
+
+eScience Lab is heavily involved in [RSQKit design and development as part of EVERSE](https://everse.software/services/rsqkit/), by Aleksandra Nenadic, Michael Sparks and Shoaib Sufi.

_products/tess.md

@@ -16,5 +16,8 @@ TeSS (Training eSupport System) is a portal for aggregating, discovering, organi
  * Trainers (to expose training materials created by trainers)
  * ELIXIR nodes (to provide a 1-stop-shop giving an at-a-glance view of nodes’ training landscape, allowing nodes to contribute to the catalogue of training resources and promote their latest news, events, activity highlights, etc.)
 
+The [mTeSS-X Project](/projects/mtess-x/) (Multi-space Training e-Support System with eXchange) overcomes the fragmentation of training resources across Research Infrastructures and the European Science Clusters. 
+The project aims to enhance existing TeSS-based training registries or catalogues like [ELIXIR TeSS (life sciences)](https://tess.elixir-europe.org/) and [PaN-Training (photon and neutron)](https://www.panosc.eu/training-catalogue/) by building an aggregator for these and similar platforms.
+
  TeSS was originally funded though the [ELIXIR EXCELERATE project](/projects/excelerate). It is written in Ruby on Rails.
 

about.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@ permalink: /about/
 ---
 
 
-The eScience Lab research group is led by [Professor Carole Goble](http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Carole.goble/). The group is based at the [Department of Computer Science](http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/),  [The University of Manchester](http://www.manchester.ac.uk). It's affiliated with the wider [Information Management Group](https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/research/expertise/information-management/).
+The eScience Lab research group is led by [Professor Carole Goble](http://www.manchester.ac.uk/research/Carole.goble/) and [Stian Soiland-Reyes](https://research.manchester.ac.uk/en/persons/soiland-reyes). The group is based at the [Department of Computer Science](http://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/),  [The University of Manchester](http://www.manchester.ac.uk). It's affiliated with the wider [Information Management Group](https://www.cs.manchester.ac.uk/research/expertise/information-management/).
 
 The [eScience Lab team](/people/) are focused on the research and development of products and practices designed for data driven and computational research. The eScience  [tools](/products/) and techniques support the coming together of people, data and methods, the sharing of the research objects of science and the automation of analysis and data pipelines using computational workflows.