Twenty-six complete proposals were received, and more ideas were discussed with VA coordinators but not submitted. Of the submissions to the ideas call:

• Number of proposers varied from one (in 7 proposals) to 15.

• Number of digitising institutions varied from one (in 16 proposals) to 13 (mostly in the range of 2-6 institutions).

• Five proposals submitted indicative cost information, while the remainder did not.

• Proposals were primarily taxonomically focussed, often with a secondary geographic focus and in some instances with a focus on a particular collector.

• One proposal focussed entirely on Paleontological material, and four on both fossil and extant material. The remainder focussed fully on Life Science collections, including a spread across plant (algae, bryophytes, vascular plants) and animal (insects, other invertebrates, vertebrates) groups.

• Proposals covered a wide range of collection and preservation types, including herbarium sheets, envelopes, microscope slides, pinned material, spirit, analog images, and dry material including whole specimens, skeletons and skins.

• Workflows were primarily focused on 2D imaging (often stacking for high resolution), transcription and georeferencing, but also include 3D imaging, microscopy, CT scanning and molecular sampling.

• Five submissions left the field about data licencing blank. Of the 21 that specified potential licences, only two listed exclusively CC-BY-NC, with the majority listing CC0 and CC-BY.

1.1 - It is vital to contact the VA coordinator(s) of any institution you may wish to work with as soon as possible, and there will be a deadline for this in Call 1, after which digitising institutions may not be able to support your proposal. Contact with the digitising institutions should be through the coordinator, who will need to promptly engage other relevant staff in their institution (e.g. collections managers, curators) to provide relevant collections information.

1.2 - Proposal documentation requires the direct input of both the proposer(s) and the digitising institution(s) (via the VA coordinators). We will make it as clear as possible in the process of Call submissions who is responsible for completing each section (for example digitising institutions should state the timeline for data release); but overall the proposal requires a joint effort and agreement among all parties, and you should allow time for these communications. Everyone named as a proposer or digitising institution must have been consulted - please do not include anybody without checking this with them.

1.3 - Proposers should check for related collections beyond the most obvious one or two institutions. Even if your proposal picks a small number of collections, it is useful to show why you chose these and what consideration was given to others. For the call, we expect that all VA coordinators will be able to see all proposals, so that they are able to flag additional relevant collections in their institutions.

1.4 - Digitising institutions are not obliged to support all proposals. VA coordinators who receive multiple suggested proposals should consider institutional capacity, and which proposals are most likely to be prioritised. Feasibility is also key - digitising institutions should only support proposals where they believe the workflow can be supported successfully (allowing for some being more innovative than others).

1.5 - It is fine to include proposers/researchers from outside the EU, and this may strengthen the case for overall impact on societal challenges - however all proposals must have clear benefit for the European research community.

2.1 - While there is not a hard and fast rule against proposing digitisation of your own institution’s collections, or against proposing digitisation of a collection from a single institution, the most persuasive proposals as a minimum have support from researchers across multiple locations, and ideally also include digitisation at more than one collection. This avoids any perception of benefits being limited to individual researchers or research groups, in line with the overall aspirations of VA to respond to strong demand by current, emerging, and new user communities.

2.2 - There is a possible exception to this around digitisation of genuinely unique collections, for instance those that have unique geographic and taxonomic coverage AND offer insights of wider relevance. In such an instance, support from a wide base of researchers remains important, and it is also helpful to set out why collections are unique and what has been done to investigate any related collections.

2.3 - It is also possible that you may choose to limit your proposal to a few digitising institutions e.g. where workflows involve substantial innovation and cost - coverage should be balanced with feasibility. If you see your proposal as a first step that may then expand to further collections if successful, please make this clear in your case.

2.4 - While proposals may have many partners, they should have a single focus area. If your proposal is linked to others, please state this in the text.

2.5 - It is vital that proposals are research-enabling. Workflow innovation is important, and can help make your case for prioritisation, but cannot be the sole or main benefit of a proposal.

2.6 - That said, VA is not a research fund, and research outputs cannot be funded through these proposals. Statements about research belong in the impact fields of the submission, not the proposed workflows.

2.7 - When setting out your proposals, it is important to provide (brief) evidence to support your statements - for example if you make reference to national or international networks, provide specific details (or ideally engage these in active support of your proposal as co-proposers). Similarly when suggesting research and/or benefits, while these may be forward-looking and not yet under way it is important to be as specific as possible. If there is an existing research record in the area covered by your proposal, you may wish to cite these in the impact sections of the submission and say how you expect research to develop.

2.1 - Alongside this, it is useful to state your case as clearly as possible, avoiding or explaining technical terms (such as scientific names of organisms: while all botanists might know what Solanaceae are, some zoologists might not; conversely Heteroptera might be easily understandable to an entomologist, but not to a bryologist). While the prioritisation panel will be expert in our field, their backgrounds and nationalities will vary, and it is good practice to use language that can be widely and easily understood.

3.1 - Both the digitisation AND the data release are to be done by the digitising institution(s), not by the proposer(s). This is to ensure efficient and consistent workflows and data. Transnational Access (TA) can include digitisation by individual visitors for their own research: if this is of interest to you, then subject to host approval and support it may be that your proposal is better suited to TA.

3.2 - Open means open, and should be as fast as possible - this is a core requirement of Virtual Access and key to the benefits and impact case for proposals. Ideally, data release should take place as projects proceed, or at the latest immediately after completion - reasons for longer timescales should be clearly stated. It is unlikely that projects will be prioritised if data release is subject to legal or other compliance restrictions (e.g. human remains), or is dependent on work outside the scope of the funded project (e.g. would not be released until substantial further work is undertaken).

3.3 - For the ideas call, we offered a choice of licencing types to assess community views on this. The vast majority of ideas call submissions selected non-restrictive licences (CC-0, CC-BY or equivalent), sometimes also selecting Non-Commercial as an option. Only two selected exclusively Non-Commercial licensing, and only one mentioned Share-Alike. Non-commercial and even Share-Alike licences are restrictive in practice (more so than many people realise - for example they limit certain educational uses), so only non-restrictive licensing will be permitted under the Virtual Access Calls going forward. This will be clear in the proposal form and guidance.

3.4 - Data release should be on established institutional or global platforms with longevity, e.g. GBIF, Zenodo, GenBank. Data release cannot be via citizen science platforms (although they could be used to serve data for uses subsequent to VA projects).

4.1 - It is clear from this Ideas Call that costing proposals for VA is challenging for all of the institutions involved. In addition, this is a high workload and many proposals were either not ready to undertake detailed costing for the ideas call or did not feel they had sufficient resources to work on costings at this stage. Further guidance on costs will be provided to VA coordinators and to proposers (see below).

4.2 - Costs will be allocated to institutions on a demand basis in line with the prioritised VA proposals, regardless of what was in the original institutional indicative bids in the SYNTHESYS+grant proposal (Smith et al. 2019).

4.3 - In very broad terms, allowable costs are those categories that institutions included in their original indicative VA bids, and which go towards creating Virtual Access to data (including images etc). We expect that the majority of costs will be for staff resources, including digitisers, and for consumables such as barcodes. No capital costs e.g. for lasting and substantial equipment are allowable. No research costs are allowable. Costs for preparation e.g. curator time, and for data release e.g. limited amounts of development, may be allowable depending on their place in prioritised proposals. Major database development is unlikely to be allowable - data release should make use of existing databases and websites (e.g. Collections management systems, aggregators and institutional sites).