International Co-operation for e-infrastructure projects

Discussion and contributions received on Digital4Science

Which International Co-operation for e-infrastructure projects?

It is well recognised that research is global, and our aim is for every researcher anywhere in the world to have access to research facilities. We want to explore methods and tools to reach this objective. Skill development, training, capacity building are also essential aspects to be taken into consideration. ICT is now recognised by the UN as contributing to poverty reduction. Numerous e-infrastructures projects focus their work on Africa and Latin America and on how to maximise co-operation with Europe. Key challenges for researchers in developing countries are access, connectivity, computation, data collection and processing; but the potential for innovation and application of ICT for development is high. Some of the questions to be explored:  How to achieve synergies and co-operation of projects in this group and beyond?  How to involve local players and stakeholders including decision makers?  How ICT skill development and training can be applied locally and transferred to local trainers for sustainability?  What are the common methods and tools that can be applied by all or most of the projects?  How to maximise the use of lessons learned in the past?  How to collect and disseminate local lessons learned effectively and measure KPIs?  How to give visibility to local/regional innovation and explore wider take-up? A set of common KPIs - Davide Salomoni In order to work toward a mutual sharing of ideas and synergy across project, it would be helpful to share and to achieve a mutual understanding of key performance indicators: which metrics are deemed important, the way they are measured, and why and how were these metrics selected. As the situation stands now, different projects are evaluated by different sets of experts, and this is probably unavoidable; but the importance attributed to KPIs by these evaluators probably varies significantly. If, as it is my understanding, KPIs are essential to understand business objectives of any given project (first and foremost for the project itself), not having a common vision of which KPIs might be useful or not (at least for projects grouped into similar areas), and of how they are expressed and measured, might lead to difficulties in creating synergies. Besides that, it might create problems in a comprehensive evaluation of project outcomes. On the other hand, we could all profit from sharing the KPIs we have defined in our projects and the best practices that led to their definition, at least in two ways: - first, in better understanding the business objectives of each project; - secondly, in getting insights into how to improve the effectiveness of our own project. The problem is obviously not trivial, since scopes are different. However, we might start from the similarities, for example: which KPIs are supposedly to be expressed by all e-infrastructure projects? By all e-infrastructure projects belonging the same project group? And so on. Perhaps this could eventually lead to a bi-directional outcome: the EC could on the one hand define general guidelines on how should KPIs be defined, evaluated, etc in future calls or in reviews, and (clustered) projects might on the other hand agree on how would these guidelines be translated into reality through some common understanding. I thus propose that in the working groups of this cooperation initiative we talk about these points. I'll start with the project I am coordinating. INDIGO-DataCloud has been defining KPIs in several deliverables. Some of them have already been published, and you can find them all at https://www.indigo-datacloud.eu/pages/components/deliverables.html. For example, since INDIGO is a project that writes software, there is an extensive set of KPIs to make informed decisions and reduce uncertainty with respect to the software quality criteria we defined, and these are available in deliverable D3.1, "Initial plan for WP3". It is likely that other H2020 projects also writing software have come to a different set of KPIs and I think it would be helpful to understand them. Also, we have KPIs related to dissemination activities, and these are available in deliverable D2.2, "Dissemination plan". More complicated is the definition of KPIs for our JRA work packages, where metrics are related to user-defined requirements on the one hand and to technological choices on the other hand. These will appear in forthcoming JRA-releated architectural deliverables. This is another area where I think sharing of ideas with other similar projects could definitely help in achieving synergies.

Global eInfrastructure co-operation: Networking at ICT2015 – Aniyan Varghese

Please find the slides presented at the networking session: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/fg0cb3t27stz381/AADsLQke-6rj6ABAYjFiE8IWa?dl=0 MAGIC is promoting ICT to enable communities of practice to collaborate. This has the potential to become as common as eduroam and the impact of a defacto approach to collaboration through one worldwide system is hugely significant for international cooperation. Sci-GaIA is promoting ICT to enable scientific gateways to support the computing and data needs of communities of practice. It is creating training materials to help communities of practice and NRENs to develop their own scientific gateways. It is also promoting open science – an ICT-based approach to sharing scientific publications, data and software that will enable communities of practice to share openly the outputs of their research. This complements the collaborative ICT being promoted by MAGIC and jointly have the potential of producing exciting new platforms for international cooperation. TANDEM is promoting NRENs and their ICT services in the WACREN region of Africa. The demonstrators of both MAGIC and Sci-GaIA are showing the impact of NRENs and their services in an African context and helping TANDEM to energise the dissemination of these vital services in the region. Together MAGIC, Sci-GaIA and TANDEM present unique opportunities for collaboration that our projects are actively pursuing and an excellent example of how international cooperation can be strengthened through tightly clustered groups of projects and initiatives.

Trans-national and Virtual Access The European Commission adopted the Horizon 2020 Work Programme 2016 – 2017 European Research Infrastructures (including e-Infrastructures).. The programme specifies that funding will be provided to support, in particular, the trans-national and virtual access activities provided to European researchers. Integrating Activities shall combine, in a closely co-ordinated manner trans- national access or virtual access activities, to support scientific communities in their access to the identified key research infrastructure. The strongest impact for advanced communities is expected typically to arise from focusing on innovation aspects and widening trans-national and virtual access provision. For the evaluation of proposals submitted under INFRAIA-01-2016-2017, INFRAIA-02-2017, EINFRA- 11-2016, EINFRA-12-2017, the criterion Excellence includes a subtopic related to access. The extent to which the Access Activities (trans-national access and/or virtual activities) will offer access to state-of-the-art infrastructures, high quality services and will enable users to conduct excellent research will be valued. For the GÉANT Partnership projects the operation of e-infrastructure services will be funded by supporting virtual access activities provided to researchers. Those service activities shall comply with the conditions set out in Article 16.2 for virtual access to research infrastructures of the model grant agreement. Capital investments (i.e. costs of renting, leasing, purchasing depreciable equipment, infrastructure or other assets) will be eligible costs for this specific partnership project, in accordance with the general eligibility conditions of the Model Grant Agreement. Furthermore the SGA (a) Research and Education Networking – GÉANT includes for the criterion excellence the extent to which the Service Activities (Trans-national and/or Virtual Access Activities) addressing the point "Integration and consolidation of e-infrastructure platforms supporting European policies and research and education communities" will offer access to state-of-the-art infrastructures and high quality services, and will enable users to conduct excellent research as demonstrated, inter-alia, by both the quality of the associated catalogue of services and the baseline and expected future measurements of related KPIs. In order to facilitate the process of proposal preparation we would like to open the debate on Trans- national and virtual access activities and cost reporting with some preliminary questions to be explored:  What are the Trans-national and Virtual Access activities that you see necessary for the European Scientific sector?  To what was extent would you quantify its importance?  Which scientific domains would be the most benefitted by those activities?  Which problems do you find with the reporting of trans-national and virtual access activities?

Debate - Hans Pfeiffenberger

It is almost self-explanatory that e-Infrastructures for science *need to be* trans-national (*) and accessible from everywhere. Except where national regulations, e.g. about privacy, protection of personal data (think: medical), "stand in the way". There are no technical impediments to and the economies of scale as well as the usefulness for science would even favour *global* disciplinary e- infrastructures over national ones. Therefore, funding and other regulatory conditions must be changed and solutions to, say, the data protection problem be found, such that infrastructures can be built and operated to take maximum advantage of said factors. The advantage of success in building this kind of infrastructures cannot be over-rated. The alternative would be national islands of information, which would not only be duplication of efforts on a vast scale but also a massive impediment to effective aggregation, comparison ... at a global or any border-less scale. Which is a normal, at least for most of the STM disciplines. The biggest problem with "reporting of trans-national and virtual access activities" arises if funders impose, or seem to impose technically, scholarly and otherwise unnecessary requirements on user registration and licensing in, e.g. data access. It cannot typically be considered "open access" if machine access to data is made impossible or data users are asked to disclose their ideas much prior to an eventual publication of results of their use of the information or services provided. (*) To me, "transnational" does not mean that the physical part of an e-infrastructure must be distributed over a number of nations. Rather, usage must not be tied to the nationality of a user

Making African science more visible worldwide: Sci-GaIA Guidelines on Open Access Repositories - SciGaia

Making African science more visible worldwide: Sci-GaIA Guidelines on Open Access Repositories The Sci-GaIA consortium is proud to announce the release of the “Guidelines to setup and configure an appliance for the deployment of standard compliant Open Access Repositories“, authored by the University of Catania, with the contribution of CSIR – Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. One of the objectives of the Sci-GaIA project (H2020 e-Infrastructures & International cooperation) is to strengthen and expand e-Infrastructure and Science Gateway related services. In particular, to expand and extend activities carried out in past projects, consolidating the services in an African e- Infrastructure. One of the goals is to support the creation of an African Open Linked Data Infrastructure. Such an infrastructure should be interoperable with and federated to those elsewhere, and this is best done by the adoption of international standards and guidelines. Sci-GaIA also aims at exploiting Open Access repositories together with Science Gateways in order to deal with very important Open Science related topics such as the discoverability, reproducibility and reusability of scholarly and scientific digital objects. All this will make African science and scientists more visible and will allow the extension of the principles of the European Research Area well beyond its southern border. In this context, the project worked on a document presenting the template of a standards-compliant Open Access repository, delivered by the project as a fully- functional, reproducible, proof of principle – a contextualised template of good practice which communities can refer to or even re-use directly. Sci-GaIA supports the Open Science paradigm the whole Consortium is committed to setup a platform for re-producible and re-usable science across Europe and Africa and one the deemed key components is a template for an Open Access Repository (OAR) that could be easily deployable wherever it is required in the region targeted by the project. The Sci-GaIA Open Access Repository is based on the INFN Open Access Repository whose implementation details and functionalities are described in detail in the document. Included in the Sci-GaIA document are:  Key concepts and driving considerations with regards to Open Science (key enablers, schools of thought, etc);  Requirements concerning the digital assets, the choices made and their motivations;  Guidelines on how to install and configure a virtual appliance containing the template repositories as well as a report on the current state of activities

The Sci-GaIA Open Access Repository has the double function of being the project’s document repository (in order to comply with the EC Open Data Pilot) and the template to be cloned in many places in Africa to make science “made in Africa” more visible, re-producible and re-usable. Within this very fertile, exciting and fascinating landscape created around open science, the breakthrough concept of Open Science Commons is emerging as the ensemble of management principles that may actually implement Open Science guidelines. According to the Open Science Commons principles, research data, scientific instruments, digital services (including those for data- intensive science), software, written knowledge (e.g., scientific publications, educational and training resources), expertise from people, etc. are openly and widely shared across virtual research communities encompassing a variety of different disciplines. Due to the huge importance of the above concepts and the key role they can play for the development of Africa and for making science “made in Africa” more visible worldwide, most of the work carried out by Sci-GaIA in its first months has been concentrated on setting up an Open Science Commons Platform for Africa comprising all the tools and services needed to enable Open Science workflows. ______Useful links to go further into the matter:  Download the “Guidelines to setup and configure an appliance for the deployment of standard compliant Open Access Repositories”, now available on the Sci-GaIa website;  Access the Sci-GaIA Open Access Repository;  See the Sci-GaIA OAR Video tutorial;  Join the African e-Infrastructures Discussion Forum in order to discuss the development of Open Access Repositories. 

TANDEM WACREN survey: Establishing the need for National Research and Education Networks services in the Western and Central Africa region!

TANDEM activities aim at enhancing the dialogue between WACREN, End Users, NRENs and research and tertiary education institutes of the Western and Central Africa region, in order to elaborate an implementation roadmap of a service portfolio answering to the End User needs. In support to these service-oriented activities, TANDEM has launched a survey to gather the End User requirements in order to establish the need for National Research and Education Networks services in the region. This TANDEM WACREN survey therefore gives End Users the opportunity to say what future services they would like from an NREN in their country. The results will be used to guide the development of a WACREN roadmap for the future implementation of key NREN services in the region. The survey consists of four sections: NREN Services for Education; NREN Services for Research; Networking Technology and Application Management; Personal Details and Contact Information.

Survey links:  Take the online survey now in English or French!  Download the printable versions in English or French and know more about this TANDEM activity and the survey ______In support of this survey, TANDEM has created a support document demonstrating the benefits of National Research and Education networks. The document provides the following information: explains what NRENs are, lists and describes the possible services that can be offered by NRENs (network and connectivity services, middleware services, collaboration support services); explains what NRENs mean to end users; describes the role that a strong Regional Research and Education Network can play in supporting NRENs; provides an overview of WACREN, UbuntuNet Alliance, GEANT, RedCLARA, ASREN.  Download the document in English and in French by visiting the page dedicated to this TANDEM task ______TANDEM (TransAfrican Network Development) is a Horizon 2020 project aiming at supporting dialogue between the EU and African Research and Education Networks, with special attention to Western and Central Africa region ______Follow the e-Infrastructures for Africa Community:

 @eI4Africa #TandemWacren  LinkedIn Group