Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie
dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”

Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, a three-years project funded under the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, has now taken up its work to implement Open Access on a pan-European scale. This ambitious effort unites 38 partners from 27 European countries.
The main goal of OpenAIRE is to support the Open Access pilot, launched by the European Commission in August 2008. This Open Access pilot, which covers about 20% of the FP7 budget, commits researchers from 7 thematic areas (Health, Energy, Environment, Information & Communication Technology, Research Infrastructures, Socio-economic sciences & Humanities and Science in Society) to deposit their research publications in an institutional or disciplinary Open Access repository, to be made available worldwide in full text.
OpenAIRE will establish underlying structures for researchers to support them in complying with the pilot through European Helpdesk System, build an OpenAIRE portal and e-Infrastructure for the repository networks, and explore scientific data management services together with 5 disciplinary communities.

Start: 2009-12-01      End: 2012-11-30

Project website:  http://www.openaire.eu/

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

Several research communities in Europe exploit e-Infrastructures, sharing data and computing resources with Grid and Supercomputing technology. However the inherent complexity of these technologies has limited their wider adoption and their long term sustainability: designing, developing and operating a computing infrastructure for an e-Science community remains challenging and costly.
VENUS-C will develop and deploy an industrial-quality service-oriented platform based on virtualisation technologies to serve research and industrial user communities, leveraging previous experiences and competences of grids amd supercomputing, while investigating new sustainable business models. For Europe to remain at an international competitive edge, it needs to continue investing aggressively in new computing technologies such as those proposed by VENUS-C. These could develop into an essential infrastructure of the information economy.
VENUS-C will foster the development of Cloud Computing service offerings taking advantage of existing international opportunities and European industrial potential. Ten years ago, Europe successfully applied a similar approach with Grid computing, importing key technology from the US to quickly become a world-wide leader. By exploiting commercial solutions, but avoiding vendor lock-in with effective interoperability, VENUS-C will provide an easy way to deploy end-user services, dynamically extending e-infrastructures capabilities, addressing all aspects of a sustainable infrastructure.
VENUS-C is a Europe-driven industry-led consortium with skilled partners and a strong, international advisory committee formed by worldwide experts in distributed computing and scientific applications. The user communities involved are: Bioinformatics, System Biology, Drug discovery, Civil Protection, Civil Engineering, and Digital Libraries. Twenty short-term experiments will be supported in the second year of VENUS-C through a competitive selection process.

Start: 2010-06-01      End: 2012-05-31

Project website: http://www.venus-c.eu/

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

The main goal of EUBrazilOpenBio is to deploy an e-Infrastructure of open access resources (data, tools, services), to make significant strides towards supporting the needs and requirements of the biodiversity scientific community. This data e-Infrastructure will result from the federation and integration of substantial individual existing data, cloud, and grid EU and Brazilian infrastructures and resources across the biodiversity and taxonomy domain: namely Catalogue of Life, OpenModeller, D4Science-II and Venus-C. The breadth and depth of the resulting data infrastructure and the openness of its resources will enable a large variety of new cost-effective, cross-disciplinary virtual research environment applications thus opening the way to its widespread adoption and exploitation by the worldwide biodiversity scientific community. Accelerating the creation of a data e-Infrastructure of open access resources pursues interoperability with end-user technologies, and contributes to social, environmental agendas. Europe through international cooperation can facilitate the exploitation of European excellence and results in data infrastructure and cloud computing to enhance European competitiveness and job opportunities.
Project goals are two Use Cases: 1. Integration between Regional and Global Taxonomies; 2. Data usability and use of ecological niche modelling.  The interoperation runs through all infrastructures: hardware and computing facilities, portals and platforms, scientific data knowledge infrastructures.

Start: 2011-02-01      End: 2013-09-30

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

The HOPE project brings together a partnership of eleven European social history instutions with the aim to improve access to their highly significant but scattered (digital) collections.
It proposes to achieve this by promoting the adoption of standards and best practices for digital libraries amongst its partners, by ensuring that the metadata and the content become available through Europeana and other discovery services, and by implementing a full scale technical solution for web based discovery to delivery. More information on the HOPE website: http://www.peoplesheritage.eu/

Start: 2011-05-01      End: 2013-04-30

Project website: https://projects.iisg.nl/web/hope/

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

Marine life plays a vital role in the Earth's ecosystem. Wise and judicious management of all relevant resources is of paramount importance to ensure that all forms of marine life remain sustainable. However, efforts in this direction are severely hindered by extreme compartmentalization and heterogeneity at all levels and sectors: the global, national, and local organizations active in the field; the different scientific disciplines involved; the methodologies used to acquire, format and present data; the procedures used to analyze the data; and several others. The main goal of the iMarine project is, thus, to launch an initiative aimed at establishing and operating an e-infrastructure supporting the principles of the Ecosystem Approach to fisheries management and conservation of marine living resources.
iMarine has three main objectives: (i) the establishment of an iMarine Board, formed by representatives of international organisations involved in this domain, which will define a sustainability-driven data-centric e-infrastructure governance model and organizational and technological policy recommendations; (ii) the management and operation of this e-Infrastructure offering user-level and application-level services that support the recommended policies and provide relevant functionality to the stakeholders; (iii) the extension, adaptation and deployment of a rich set of software components that implement these services. Instrumental in the activities of iMarine will be the establishment of an active set of collaborations with other international initiatives. The aim will be to reuse and render interoperable existing policies, technologies, and e-infrastructures. By leveraging on these collaborations and by taking advantage of additional funding that these organizations invest in the project, the number of available resources brought into play will be maximized

Start: 2011-11-01      End: 2014-04-30

Project website:  http://www.i-marine.eu/

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

The central goal of the ENVRI project is to implement harmonised solutions and draw up guidelines for the common needs of the environmental ESFRI projects, with a special focus on issues as architectures, metadata frameworks, data discovery in scattered repositories, visualisation and data curation. This is going to empower the users of the collaborating environmental research infrastructures and will enable multidisciplinary scientists to access, study and correlate data from multiple domains for system level research. The collaborative effort has to ensure that each infrastructure can fully benefit from the integrated new ICT capabilities beyond the project duration by adopting the ENVRI solutions as part of their ESFRI implementation plans. In addition, the result will strengthen the European contributions to GEOSS - the Global Earth Observation System of Systems. All the nine Social Benefit Areas identified and addressed by GEO-GEOSS will take advantage of such approach.

Start: 2011-11-01      End: 2014-04-30

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

OpenAIREplus (2nd Generation of Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe) was launched in Pisa in early December. The 30 month project, funded by the EC 7th Framework Programme, will work in tandem with OpenAIRE, extending the mission further to facilitate access to the entire Open Access scientific production of the European Research Area, providing cross-links from publications to data and funding schemes. This large-scale project brings together 41 pan-European partners, including three cross-disciplinary research communities.
The project will capitalise on the successful efforts of the OpenAIRE project which is rapidly moving from implementing the EU Open Access Pilot project into a service phase, enabling researchers to deposit their FP7 and ERA funded research publications into Open Access repositories. The current publication repository networks will be expanded to attract data providers from domain specific scientific areas. "The participatory design of OpenAIREplus will seamlessly guide the researcher to Open Access research data.
Creating a robust, participatory service for the cross-linking of peer-reviewed scientific publications and associated datasets is the principal goal of OpenAIREplus. The project will establish an e-Infrastructure to harvest, enrich and store the metadata of Open Access scientific datasets. Innovative underlying technical structures will be deployed to support the management of and inter-linking between associated scientific data.
Access to and deposit of linked publications via the OpenAIRE portal will be supported by a Help Desk, and OpenAIRE's collaborative networking structure will be extended to promote the concept of open enhanced publications among user communities. Liaison offices in each of the project's 31 European countries work to support the needs of researchers in Europe. The project will also actively leverage its international connections to contribute to common standards, data issues and interoperability on a global level.

Start: 2011-12-01      End: 2014-05-31

Project website: http://www.openaire.eu

Contact:  Donatella Castelli

FG1914 will digitise and make available 710 hours of film and 6.800 film-related items on the theme of World War I held by 21 European archives in 15 countries. The content will be made available through the EFG Portal and Europeana and, addition to that, in a special virtual exhibition dedicated to the content digitised in the project and to themes around WWI, film, the European film industries and their audiences in a decade of conflict and cataclysm. It complies with the requirement of the ICT-PSP Work programme 2011 in that it provides content complementary to content already available in Europeana, especially considering that several initiatives by Europeana itself and digitisation projects already running are gathering collections from libraries, paper archives and private collections. EFG1914 proposes to fill a large part of the audiovisual gap on this theme for Europeana.
It does so by utilizing the developments made by the EFG – The European Film Gateway Best Practice Network. With its tested and running D-Net application of the EFG Information Space, EFG provides the solutions needed for aggregating metadata in Europeana and, hence, making the content to be digitised available through Europeana.
Drawing from the results of the Edcine IST project, EFG1914 also addresses some of the digitisation, encoding and workflow issues that specifically apply to film.
The project is supported by the Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (ACE) and the Europeana Foundation itself.

Start: 2012-01-01      End: 2014-12-31

Project website: http://www.madgik.di.uoa.gr/content/1055

Contact:  Donatella Castelli