COST Action and European GBIF Nodes Anne-Sophie Archambeau

The Call is open to ideas in all fields of Science and Technology. Proposals must include researchers from at least five COST Member Countries or Cooperating State. COST aims to enable breakthrough scientific developments leading to new concepts and products. It thereby contributes to strengthening Europe’s research and innovation capacities … supporting high quality, collaborative networks in all fields of science and technology while facilitating focus on existing but less prevailing areas allowing to increase COST overall impact: identifying early warning signals of unforeseen societal problems aiming at contributing to Societal Challenges COST call

COST does NOT fund research itself, but supports networking by the means of different tools such as meetings, short term scientific missions, training schools and dissemination activities through COST Actions close the gap between science, policy makers and society Selected proposals for COST Actions will get a financial support in the range of EUR p.a., normally for four years, subject to available budget. COST call

Last year : Proposal “Integrating the integrations for biodiversity information in Europe” => gaining true integration of biodiversity data in Europe and beyond 15 participants: Lead by Spain Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, Finland, UK, Ireland, Luxemburg, Norway, Nederland, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Slovakia GBIF secretariat COST call

 Provide an "integration of integrations" for biodiversity information in Europe  Focus on content, processes and capacities rather than tools.  Provide a solid pan European approach to how biodiversity information is captured, documented (metadata), archived,processed (validation), made available (standards, LOD) and used. COST call

Promoting and building harmonised procedures and standards Build capacity, through training, STSM and other means in using biodiversity information (e.g. nature observation and tourism, data visualization, mapping, environmental impact assessment, etc.) Make data more usable, less scattered Look after tracking, licensing, and citation procedures Increase overall data quality, biodiversity data flows and data available COST call

Leverage capacities among the extended network, so innovation is spread Build a connected community around biodiversity data in Europe Focus on building capacity for young researchers and professional Foster innovation by putting in contact developers pursuing similar goals COST call

Implementation: “coordination” and “capacity building” Working Groups. WG1: Linking projects and COSTs Actions WG2: Long-term initiatives WG3: Outreach & training WG4: Quality control WG5: Semantic web WG6: Specimen data capture COST call

 Turned down  BUT the evaluation report provides useful feedback to prepared a better proposal. Result

Bring together some of the many EU projects and initiatives in BI. Emphasising on processes and capacity building rather than new tool development State of the art: good understanding of the EU- funded initiatives. GBIF well summarized Outreach and training targeted at Near Neighbour Countries and International Partner Countries Clear articulation of the added value to key domain stakeholders and the possibility that additional stakeholders will emerge Strenth of the proposal

Impact is coherent with the main objectives Dissemination and exploitation is planned within and also beyond the GBIF community. Return of-investment of many ongoing initiatives Deliverables are achievable and well distributed Working Group on Quality Control is good Risks well identified and include all key aspects Management structure Strong network of proposers

Weakness of the proposal Clearly set relations to full data life cycle Fails to show how through these objectives certain innovative research will be supported Support for research activity is done in an abstract way Network is trying to do too much: focus on the usability of the data that is already available Involve more than GBIF Needed interaction between overarching domain- agnostic and domain-specific initiatives, such as RDA

Weakness of the proposal Anticipated impact to science and society is not clearly defined What specific actions for categories of stakeholder Potential innovation/breakthroughs are not set clearly Reorganisation of the WGs Still some risks to look at: internal difficulties and disagreements, alignment to regional coordination procedures of GBIF in Europe How the structure and management of the Action will ensure independence from GBIF?

Next steps ? Just contacted the Science committee to improve the scientific issues. => positive feedback and start thinking Just contacted the Secretariat (Dmitry Schigel) GBIF Spain prefers give the lead to another node. Next deadline : 25 April 2016 The next Collection Date is envisaged for December 2016.

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