Call for partners for a Horizon 2020 European research infrastructures (including e-Infrastructures) project proposal

European Research Infrastructure for Asia Related Studies

INFRADEV-03-2018-2019, Deadline: 22 March 2018 17:00 http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/desktop/en/opportunities/h2020/topics/infradev- 03-2018-2019.html

The core of this project is the development of a research infrastructure for the European Asian and Asia related studies. This will create an environment for the integration of hitherto widely distributed textual resources on Asia and help strengthen research in the EU in this important area. It will enable both academic and public use in a way that allows scholars throughout Europe to fully exploit the possibilities of digital resources from and on Asia. The project aims to internationalise the CrossAsia model – CrossAsia being an established research infrastructure with international reputation among the research community of Asian and Asia related studies. By establishing a network of European partners, the project will coordinate and extend the process of licensing electronic content and develop new, state-of-the-art licensing models. In a second step, the network will focus on the provision of content, with the goal to set up a full text research infrastructure for DH developments in Asian and Asia related studies.

This network will be established by European partners in the field of Asia related and specifically who are already specialised in information management, library science, legal issues, and IT. The main goals of this EU Asia network are:

1) Improving the situation on licensing of resources with relevance for Asia related studies in Europe,

2) Coordinating and distributing responsibilities in the field of Asia content management, including licensing, hosting, archiving, extracting, standardising, and making content accessible, and

3) Establishing suitable communication structures on activities, policies and research needs from researchers to the network and vice versa. This network will be established during the project and structures will be developed that guarantee the sustainability of it beyond the duration of the funding period.

Therefore, the envisioned network will organise and coordinate two interconnected fields of activity that can build on the expertise that Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library – SBB) has already developed with CrossAsia for the German Asian and Asia related studies research community and that will be further extended and promoted on the European level together with its partners:

First, with regard to licensing policies, the envisioned project will establish a strong operational framework for licensing within multi-national contexts where each project partner will coordinate licensing within the respective geographical region. Based on the experiences with the CrossAsia licensing model made by SBB in Germany, it will contribute to the development of a sustainable European multi-national licensing model for Asian and Asia related digital content and resources. Taking into account the specific challenges of research on Asia, it will provide the full range of possibilities – from read-only access to archiving rights in conjunction with permanent access rights,

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text- and data-mining rights, and re-distribution of data. The model will embrace the integration of commercial and non-commercial databases and will be as flexible as possible in order to meet the needs of the individual institutes participating in licensing of databases, i.e. allow multi-national, multi-institutional and institutional licensing agreements. Therefore, it is possible to build upon and further develop the established governance and legal structures of CrossAsia (such as authentication, user management, etc.) as well as to establish a European network which will cooperate on and roll out a collaborative European licensing strategy. Based on the activities in the field of licensing, the goal finally is to – step-by-step – move from individual institutional rights to a European Consortium open to every Asia related research institute in Europe, i.e. to initiate the ERIC process for the field of Asian and Asia related studies.

This new and flexible European multi-national, multi-institutional or institutional licensing model will be distributed to database and content providers in Asia, as well. The advantage of this model for the European Asia information infrastructures is that they can make use of central competence in a difficult market situation in Asia, especially in . Content providers will benefit greatly by having to deal with only one consortium within the European market. Given that most potential database providers are already familiar with the German CrossAsia license model, we expect discussions to enlarge the scope to all consortium project partners to proceed smoothly.

Second, with regard to designing a European e-infrastructure, the envisioned project will develop a research environment that will leverage the full potential of digital resources from and on Asia. Researchers and analysts wishing to exploit Asia related resources in vast archives and databases that have been created over last decades by commercial vendors, public organisations, religious communities, institutions of higher learning, and the public at large, currently face the major challenge that such resources are made available in a confusing multitude of environments and formats. Moreover, commercial and non-commercial databases and archives usually are not set up to allow cross-platform collection, extraction, and analysis of data.

Accordingly, this project will make available important content and texts with relevance for Asia related studies for non-consumptive and open access research, independently from the original database applications. This includes conflation of texts from multiple sources, copyrighted texts and also openly accessible texts, extraction of these texts from database applications and guaranteeing full text access. Moving towards the goal of a one-stop repository in order to create a research environment that allows working with raw full texts from various databases and repositories, the project can extend and build upon a structure, SBB and CrossAsia are already in the process of setting up for the German research community: an Integrated Text Repository (ITR).1 In the ITR, texts from multiple sources are collected and standardised into consistent formats. Thanks to this, SBB can provide an advanced one-stop search and discovery functionality for all texts from one integrated environment, accessible via search functionality and also through authorised APIs. In order to ensure the security of copyright-protected data, SBB employs strong authentication schemes. This structure, already being set up at SBB, will be extended and enlarged in order to deal with different licensing models and usage rights on a European level. Moreover, it will form a solid fundament for future efforts that will allow researchers of the highly advanced and exceptionally growing European DH- initiatives in Asia related studies to use their own tools as well as tools developed in the global

1 This project is funded by the German Research Foundation as part of the Specialised Information Service Programme (2016-2018). 2

community for the modelling and mining of the vast resources in modern and classical Asian languages.

Proposed work packages

WP1 Project Management: Overall management, coordination and organisation of the project. (SBB)

WP2 New Licensing Models: To develop generalisable policies and sustainable administrative licensing structures for flexible European multi-national, multi-institutional, and institutional licensing agreements that are suitable for the specific challenges of Asia related research. New models for licensing include organising access to content, further rights for hosting, archiving, and text- and data-mining activities as well as other future DH activities. The success of such licensing models will be evaluated and tested against the different needs of commercial content providers such as publishers in the EU and the European research community of Asian and Asia related studies. In order to provide content to test these new licensing models, a dedicated budget for licensing of selected resources will be part of the project application. Based on the needs of the project partners/individual institutes, licenses for different electronic resources will be negotiated, finalised, and signed. (Participants: all project partners, WP leader: SBB)

WP3 Network: For building a EU Asia content network among European institutions doing research on Asia and working with resources from and about Asia and specifically East Asia, workshops in the different countries and regions of the project partners will be conducted in order to inform about the goals of the project, to distribute newly developed and defined licensing models, to coordinate the licensing process of Asia related resources in Europe among several partner institutes and regions (multi-national, multi-institutional, institutional etc.), to exchange vendor information, to provide channels for communication among researchers and the project about their activities, the established policies, the needs of the researchers, etc. (Participants: all project partners, WP leader: one of the project partners)

WP4 IT Infrastructure / indexing / text repository: Development of a sustainable and distributed IT infrastructure for technically integrating texts from multiple sources with proper search and discovery facilities, based on experiences made by SBB. Integration of reliable and secure authentication schemes that can handle very flexible multi-national, multi-institutional and institutional licensing models and usage rights. The functionality and usability of the technical infrastructure will be evaluated by associated partners as part of their DH research projects. (SBB)

WP5 Dissemination: Making the project, its goals, services, and accomplishments known among Asia related studies and East Asian studies institutes, libraries, information science institutes in Europe, among Asia related researchers in Europe and worldwide, among database vendors with resources relevant for Asia related studies, in the DH community, etc. Dissemination can be done by public relation tools such as social media, newsletters/blogs, attending conferences (poster presentations), setting up a project website, producing a printed leaflet, etc. (One of the project partners)

WP6 Sustainability: Developing a sustainability concept that ensures continuation of these efforts after the end of the projects with a special focus on the EU Asia content network (e.g. in terms of positions, structures). (One of the project partners)

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Project duration: 36 months (project start in early 2019)

Project coordinator: Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Berlin State Library – SBB)

Proposed project partners: Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC); Leiden University – University Library / Institute for Area Studies, SAS ; Nordic Institute of Asian Studies – University of Copenhagen (NIAS); Palacký University Olomouc – University Library / Department of Asian Studies; Universidad Autónoma de Madrid – Centro de Estudios de Asia Oriental

Proposed associated partners: Leiden University – Institute for Area Studies; Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPI-WG); University of Cambridge – Needham Research Institute / East Asian History of Science Library

Application Procedure and time line: Due to a very strict time line, the main application text will be realised by the project coordinator with substantial input for individual work packages by selected partner institutions. Comments and input are always welcome and extremely necessary. The main application text needs to be finished by end of February 2018 in order to allow the project coordinator to decide based on the content quality and coherence whether to proceed with the application until the deadline of the call, or to apply for follow-up call with deadline 20 March 2019. All necessary preliminary organisational work such as the partner institutions’ registration with the EU participation portal will be realised by the individual institutions by end of February 2018.

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