Collaboration and events

Collaboration

RISCAPE is strongly connected to, and benefits of, the H2020 funded (and earlier 7th Framework programme) RI cluster projects and other RI initiatives.

MERIL (2) is a H2020 project aiming towards mapping the European reearch infrastructure landscape. As such, the workload is split between RISCAPE and MERIL, with RISCAPE concentrating on the international (outside of Europe) aspect of the landscape analysis.

ENVRI PLUS is the cluster project of Environmental Research Infrastructures. It is coordinated by the University of Helsinki and the Project Director of ENVRI PLUS is also the Coordinator of the RISCAPE. ENVRI PLUS will provide the basis of the environmental RI link in the European scale during the first steps of the Landscape analysis, specifically the ENVRI PLUS Theme 6 actions (WP18) which have subtasks on international collaboration and European Landscape analysis. The H2020 project COOP+ is another current project, which concentrates on developing environmental RI collaborations initially between EU, US, Brazil, Canada and Australia; RISCAPE coordinator leads Work Package on “Collaborative Dissemination and Exploitation of RIs at a Global level” in COOP+. The environmental research part of RISCAPE is also collaborating with Belmont Forum activities and Pan-Eurasian Experiment (PEEX), which do provide direct connection to many environmental RI activities, especially in the Arctic region. Another environmental cluster project on Marine research EMBRIC, has many shared partners with ENVRI PLUS, enabling close connection between the clusters and RISCAPE.

In the biomedical sciences, the RISCAPE work is lead by ECRIN ERIC, a major partner in CORBEL cluster project. RISCAPE benefits from the ESFRI-BMS RI, who have already established significant contacts with international partners having similar and complementary approaches. This corresponds to a broad range of conditions. Some BMS RIs have extra-European partners as members of their legal structure (ERIC or other; some are involved in bilateral partnerships supported by cooperation agreements (EATRIS with TIA Australia and NIH NCATS, ECRIN with TIA Australia, NIH NCATS and KoNECT in Korea, EU-OPENSCREEN with Compounds Australia); Some are involved in multilateral cooperation projects or agreements: BBMRI is a partner in B3Africa – Bridging Biobanking and Biomedical Research across Europe and Africa; EuroBioImaging is coordinating the Global BioImaging project with imaging infrastructure experts from Australia, Argentina, South Africa, India, Japan and the United States of America; INFRAFRONTIER coordinates the IPAD-MD (H2020 CSA, Research Infrastructure for Phenotyping, Arching and Distribution of Mouse Diseases Models); Some are involved in multilateral activities implementing OECD policies (OECD Guidelines on human biobanks and genetic research databases http://www.oecd.org/science/biotech/44054609.pdf, OECD Council Recommendation on the governance of clinical trials http://www.oecd.org/sti/sci-tech/oecd-recommendation-governance-of-clinical-trials.pdf).

The European Social Survey (ESS ERIC) is the coordinating body of SERISS cluster project, and has included Israel, Russia, Ukraine and Turkey and cooperates with the South African Social Attitudes Survey. In addition, some ESS survey questions have been included on the General Social Survey in the USA and the ERANET scheme is supporting the inclusion of Russia in the project. The CESSDA data archive organisation has close links with its counterpart in the USA ICPSR at Michigan. The Gender and Generations Programme has included Australia and the Russian Federation whilst SHARE is funded in part by the US National institute for Ageing and has links with sister surveys in the USA and Japan amongst others. In addition to the international links which the core partners in Cluster Project SERISS have, SERISS also strengthens international links by including representatives from the International Social survey Programme (ISSP) and the world Values Survey (WVS) in its Board of Strategic Advice.

For the Physics side, the RISCAPE is building on Europe’s flagship centre for neutron science, ILL. ILL is the obvious contact for organisations outside Europe to liaise regarding neutron scattering and nuclear particle physics. ILL has been coordinator of NMI3-I and NMI3-II under FP7 and ILL is coordinator of SINE2020 neutron cluster project under H2020. All three projects comprise the critical mass in neutron scattering and muon spectroscopy science. The consortium is build on 8 Research facilities and several academic partners with long term collaborations in term of technological development of instrumentation components and sample environment. Over its almost fifty years of existence, ILL has also developed relationships with all major neutron scattering facilities in the world. These contacts range from exchanges of best practices, coordination of the scientific programmes, up to collaborative research projects. XFEL (leader of the EUCALL cluster) and European Spallation Source have also supported the RISCAPE project planning, even though they are not actual beneficiaries of the project.

ASTRON coordinates the ASTERICS RI cluster, and will use this link for significant leverage on the entire RISCAPE astronomy and astro-particle domain work-package. ASTERICS includes the astronomy and astro-particle physics RI Landmarks E-ELT and SKA, and the RI Projects CTA and KM3Net 2.0, as listed in the Physical Sciences & Engineering sections of the ESFRI Roadmap 2016. ASTERICS also already has been in contact with the EST (European Solar Telescope), thus completing the coverage of all RI Projects in Physical Sciences on the 2016 ESFRI Roadmap. ASTERICS furthermore engages with aspiring ESFRI projects (e.g. the Einstein Telescope, ET under the umbrella of the European Gravitational Observatory, EGO), as well as several other world-class research infrastructures (including the Joint Institute for VLBI ERIC, JIV-ERIC). The European Virtual Observatory (EURO-VO) is also a major contributor to the ASTERICS venture. The Netherlands is a full member of the International SKA Organisation (SKAO), and ASTRON’s General Director is the national Science Director/Representative on the SKAO Board. ASTRON is leading a new initiative proposed (30 March 2016) for international collaboration on e-Infrastructures and SKA: AENEAS. ASTRON is a long-standing key partner in the RADIONET Integrated Infrastructure Initiative, supported under FP5, 6, and 7 (H2020 proposal 30 March 2016), which encompasses European partners and their principal International collaborators in radio astronomy.

Partner PIN coordinates cluster project PARTHENOS, which puts together several ERICs and Research Infrastructures in the domain on Digital Humanities, Language Studies and Cultural Heritage: DARIAH (ERIC on digital humanities), CLARIN (ERIC on language studies), ARIADNE (RI on digital archaeology), IPERION-CH (RI on heritage sciences) and EHRI (RI on the Holocaust). It also inherits the work of previous RI projects recently concluded. PARTHENOS is going to develop joint policies, strategies and tools for common problems such as identity federation, data and metadata quality, standardization, common semantics, and education, with a bottom up approach based on an analysis of user community requirements.

In the e-infrastructure side, EGI.eu has collaborations with all major e-Infrastructures. For instance, in 2013, EGI.eu signed an MoU with GEANT Limited (ex-DANTE) to formalise the long-term collaboration between the EGI and GÉANT. EGI.eu has also long-terms collaborations with EUDAT, PRACE, OpenAIRE and RDA to ensure interoperability between the e-Infrastructure services and to facilitate user communities in adopting services from the different initiatives. This includes joint participation in projects for e-infrastructures in the H2020 programme. It should be noted that ICOS and UH are also part of the EUDAT2020 project, the current funded program on EUDAT. Notably through the EGI-Engage project, coordinated by EGI.eu, and the ENVRI PLUS project there are formal relationships with several pan-European or worldwide research infrastructures including, but not limited to, WLCG, ELIXIR, BBMRI, MoBrain, DARIAH, LifeWatch, EISCAT_3D, EPOS ICOS, ECRIN, ANAEE, LOFAR, SKA, DANUBIUS and CLARIN.


Communication activities

The RISCAPE communication strategy goes beyond simple communication by defining multinational activities on several levels:

  • Interaction with Stakeholders: the interaction with these actors will take place continuously throughout the whole life of the project, especially via Stakeholder Panel.
  • General publicity of activities and results of the project: publications in media targeting relevant audience and through specialized media, dissemination of project publicity material (leaflet, publications, etc.) through web site and through the partners’ networks, participation and presentations in major conferences, participation in forums, etc.
  • Organisation of dissemination events: at least 3 events will be organised at the beginning, mid term and end of the project to inform and update about RISCAPE results
  • Participation to events on topics addressed by RISCAPE, which will bring together interested parties. A good example is ICRI conference in 2018, where RISCAPE will aim to have a major event on the project progress and initial results.
  • CSA, RI and cluster projects funded under the same call or in previous and future calls
  • Other relevant end users.

During the project time, some of the key user groups, such as European Commission, representatives of ESFRI working groups, OECD, GSO, National Contact Points of RIs representatives of Member State funding mechanisms, are invited (or implicitly involved in the case of EC) to the RISCAPE Stakeholder Panel (see section 3.2.1.3), which provides intimate and direct dissemination channel of Project process to the Stakeholder groups. In this activity also the direct connection of partner APRE to the National Contact Points will be used.

For each audience, RISCAPE will work on a distinct strategy using targeted messages, means and language.

Project partners are also considered to be part of the communication strategy, in fact internal project communication is maintained by the partners UH and ICOS. The project will have a project webpage for public use and an intranet for the project partners and several internal email lists. Virtual meeting facilities (WebEx and Skype) will be strongly used during the project time, particularly between the WP2 (consistency) and the disciplinary WPs, where there will be a virtual meeting every two weeks of year 2 of the project.

 

Table 1 preliminary list of main events, along with the targeted audience for each meeting.

Name of Event # of events Type of Event Location

Target audience (total)

 

Target Group

 

RISCAPE project meeting 6  Project meeting EU 15 RISCAPE consortium
Domain workshops 8 Workshop EU

25

 

Domain related experts from EU (and sometimes non-EU) countries and initiatives
Stakeholders Panel 3 Meeting EU 20 Validation, review and demonstration meeting
Final Conference

1

 

Conference EU (planned: Brussels) 100 Policy Makers, RIs operators, ESFRI, OECD, GSO members, NCPs, funding agencies both EU and non EU

Whenever possible the events will be broadcasted to ensure a high degree of participation, in addition additional virtual events (e.g. experts meeting, consultative workshop, etc.) can be organised using ICT platforms.