Collections

Natural science collections are a treasure trove of data that are pivotal in finding solutions from and for nature; from conservation, health, minimising the degradation of natural capital and finding new sources of critical minerals, to addressing the challenges of food security, water scarcity and the impact of natural disasters.

The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) is a pan-European Research Infrastructure (RI) that aims to digitally unify natural science collections - some 1.5 billion specimens - from 175 museums, botanical gardens, and universities across 23 countries in a distributed infrastructure that makes these collections physically and digitally open and accessible for all forms of research and innovation. DiSSCo’s preparatory phase ran from January 2020 to February 2023. This collection of articles highlights the major outputs of the DiSSCo Prepare project, which address five aspects of implementation readiness: the technical, scientific, data, organisational and financial readiness levels.

Natural science collections are a treasure trove of data that are pivotal in finding solutions from and for nature; from conservation, health, minimising the degradation of natural capital and finding new sources of critical minerals, to addressing the challenges of food security, water scarcity and ...

The European Union has established the European Science Open Cloud (EOSC), as the “system of systems” Infrastructure where scientists, stakeholders and other types of users can find data, analytical web services, publications, networks and other research resources to carry out their work.

The ESFRI Research Infrastructures form five thematic Science Clusters within the EOSC ecosystem: ENVRI FAIR on the Environment, EOSC Life for the Life and Biomedical Sciences, PANOSC for the Photon and Neutron, SSHOC for the Social Sciences and Humanities and ESCAPE for the Astronomy & Particle Physics. These Clusters are critical to the development of the EOSC integrated environment for the provision of the research resources, whose integration, composition and use by their communities will undoubtedly enhance the emerging EOSC infrastructure. They also provide examples of how shared projects, the Science Projects, can contribute to addressing major societal challenges for Europe and demonstrate how Research Infrastructures can align to support Horizon Europe's missions within EOSC.

This collection of articles highlights the major outputs of these EOSC Future Science Projects: their planning, implementation and the engagement of the relevant scientific community.

The European Union has established the European Science Open Cloud (EOSC), as the “system of systems” Infrastructure where scientists, stakeholders and other types of users can find data, analytical web services, publications, networks and other research resources to carry out their work.

The ESF ...

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and metadata. FAIR Digital Objects (FDOs) promise to provide the needed framework.

FAIR is about making data findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable both for humans and machines. FAIR digital objects have shown key capabilities to simplify and scale the use of data across domains, increase trust in data and ease the handling of high volumes of information. Now widespread consensus and collaboration is needed.

The 1st International Conference of FAIR Digital Objects brings together for the first time, key technical, scientific, industry, and science-policy stakeholders at this scale with the aim to boost the development and implementation of FDOs worldwide.

This conference collection explores two of the most urgent themes in constructing the FDO framework: research in structuring the knowledge domain and how to facilitate practical work, and practice in the design and building of FDO-consistent infrastructures.

Successful management, exchange and interpretation of an ever-growing tsunami of digital information and knowledge will depend on highly automated methods dealing with combined data. This will require artificial intelligence but also robust and informative ways to store and disseminate data and meta ...

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science practices by providing access to data, tools and services at each stage of and along the entire biodiversity research life cycle (specimens, sequences, taxonomic names, analytics, publications, biodiversity knowledge graph).  

BiCIKL has a special emphasis on biodiversity literature and develops new methods and workflows for semantic publishing and integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, and re-using of sub-article-level data extracted from the published content. 

The main challenge of BiCIKL is to design, develop and implement a FAIR Data Place (FDP), a central tool for search, discovery and management of interlinked FAIR data across different domains. The key final outputs of BiCIKL is the Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), a one-stop portal, providing access to the BiCIKL services, tools and workflows, beyond the lifetime of the project.

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) builds a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners solidify open science pr ...

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) invites submissions of research outcomes - especially early and brief results - relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in light of the unprecedented health emergency and the scale of its worldwide impact on society, industry and economics.

By means of Open Science, we aim to contribute with real-time findings and data to the efforts of scientific teams, experts and other decision-makers across the globe, in order to minimise the damage and eventually bring the end to the current crisis, and even more importantly, prevent similar situations in the future. Published research ideas and brief results are also expected to bring up crucial discussion, thereby facilitating actions and collaborations in the fight against devastating health emergencies.

Especially encouraged are submissions focused on the long-term effects of COVID-19. Considered are publications across disciplines, including medicine, ethics, politics, economics etc. at a local, regional, national or international scale. Accepted publication types include: Research articles, Research Idea, Case Study, Clinical Case Study, Data Paper, Forum Paper, Methods, Questionnaire, R Package, Software Description, Workshop Report, Project Report, Research Poster, Research Presentation, Short Communication, Single-media Publication (e.g. infographics), Data Review.

We also encourage publication of research ‘bundles’, where conventional papers are published along with raw research outputs (e.g. data, case studies, presentations, etc.), to better contextualise the work and facilitate further contribution by other scientists.

Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO Journal) invites submissions of research outcomes - especially early and brief results - relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic in light of the unprecedented health emergency and the scale of its worldwide impact on society, industry and economics.

By means of Open Science ...

This collection hosts outputs from the FP7-funded EU project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). The project proposes an innovative approach in terms of integration of biodiversity information systems from on-ground to remote sensing data, for addressing policy and information needs in a timely and customized way.

This collection hosts outputs from the FP7-funded EU project Building the European Biodiversity Observation Network (EU BON). The project proposes an innovative approach in terms of integration of biodiversity information systems from on-ground to remote sensing data, for addressing policy and infor ...

The Path2Integrity project, financed by the EU Horizon 2020, advocates for emphasising the virtues of Research Integrity and strengthening the relationship between science and society in the rapidly changing research landscape. By designing and implementing rotatory role-playing and role-models, the project will maximise the quality and societal impact of research and foster Research Integrity by educating the next generation. Within the three-year research and innovation programme, dialogical trainings will pave the way towards achieving enhanced and successful educational practices and learning methods targeted at students and young researchers, as well as everyone directly or indirectly involved in research, including educators and senior researchers.

The Path2Integrity project, financed by the EU Horizon 2020, advocates for emphasising the virtues of Research Integrity and strengthening the relationship between science and society in the rapidly changing research landscape. By designing and implementing rotatory role-playing and role-models, t ...

Addressing today’s global environmental challenges requires access to significant quantities of data. This holds especially true for the natural sciences, where one rich data trove remains unearthed: The European scientific collections. These jointly hold more than 1.5 billion objects, representing 80% of the world’s bio- and geo-diversity. With only 10 % of these objects digitised, their information remains vastly underused, thus impeding potential applications of this critical scientific resource.

The EU-funded ICEDIG project – “Innovation and Consolidation for Large Scale Digitisation of Natural Heritage” - aims to support the implementation phase of the new Research Infrastructure DiSSCo (“Distributed System of Scientific Collections”) by designing and addressing the technical, financial, policy and governance aspects necessary to operate such a large distributed initiative for natural sciences collections across Europe. This collection of articles highlights the major outputs of the ICEDIG project over the last three years (January 2018 to March 2020).

Addressing today’s global environmental challenges requires access to significant quantities of data. This holds especially true for the natural sciences, where one rich data trove remains unearthed: The European scientific collections. These jointly hold more than 1.5 billion objects, representing  ...

This collection hosts contents of the PhD project of Viktor Senderov dedicated to the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management system. It will deal with novel ways for publishing, visualizing and dissemination of biodiversity and biodiversity-related data. This PhD project is part of the BIG4 network.

This collection hosts contents of the PhD project of Viktor Senderov dedicated to the Open Biodiversity Knowledge Management system. It will deal with novel ways for publishing, visualizing and dissemination of biodiversity and biodiversity-related data. This PhD project is part of the BIG4 network.