Work programme 2008

The objectives of the Alliance have been stated in the Alliance position paper of 2006. They translate into a work programme containing seven main categories:

1. Positioning the Alliance
2. Working with communities
3. Coordination and stimulation of research and the development of tools
4. Developing the accreditation mechanism
5. Relations with countries outside Europe
6. Formalising and strengthening the Alliance
7. Developing a business model.

1. Positioning the Alliance
The Alliance aims to develop a shared vision and framework for a sustainable organisational infrastructure for permanent access to scientific information. The Alliance has expressed the ambition to be a strategic partner for governments, including and foremost the European Union, to help develop and implement their policies in the area of preservation and long-term access.
In November 2007 the Alliance organised a strategic conference in Brussels, attended by representatives of the Commission, of national governments and of major projects, to convince all these various parties of the need for coordination and to try and rally them around the proposal for a European Digital Information Infrastructure. The conference was aimed at getting the commitment of the major stakeholders (EC and others) for the proposed infrastructure and the approach of the Alliance. Conference presentations

1.1. Annual Alliance Conference 2008
As a follow-up of the 2007 conference the Alliance will organise an annual conference to reach out to all its stakeholders, discuss progress, relate various developments to the overall framework and identify new action areas.

1.2. Lobbying to get on the updated ESFRI Road Map
ESFRI has started updating its Research Infrastructures Roadmap in 2007. The Alliance should strive to get its ambitions and initiatives on the updated list that will appear in 2008. ESFRI seems to be struggling with the humanities and social sciences projects that are on its Roadmap. The areas covered by these projects are considered too limited and ESFRI would like to lift them to a higher aggregation level. The organisational infrastructure of the Alliance seems fit to somehow play a role here.
The Alliance will organise a workshop focused on the humanities and social sciences.

1.3. FP7 projects
Within the Research Infrastructures Work Programme call INFRA-2007-3.3 Studies, conferences and coordination actions supporting policy development, including international cooperation for e-Infrastructures
is of interest to the Alliance. The Alliance submitted two bids in 2007: PARSE.Forum and PARSE.Insight. PARSE.Insight has been granted. Though a weak version of establishing a Forum, which was the key idea of PARSE.Forum, has been included, the need remains to create a much more sophisticated Forum which a high-quality website that is maintained well and updated frequently. The Alliance will look for other funding opportunities for this. The kick-off meeting for what is now called PARSE has taken place in the middle of April 2008.

2. Working with communities
The Alliance puts centre stage working with selected communities to get the ball rolling. Working with communities, such as particle physics, astronomy and space science, life sciences, earth and environmental sciences or social sciences, entails a variety of activities. Issues include which documents, data or multimedia objects to preserve, and for how long, identifying key repositories, establishing a scheme for metadata suitable for the community, agreeing on certain standards to make the repositories interoperable, organising testbeds, and so on and so forth. Another issue is to identify from which common facilities they will benefit, such as common R&D, technical tools and a single accreditation body for guaranteeing the quality of companies or organisations that verify whether a repository meets the requirements.
The PARSE project will help greatly in organising the work for communities. On the one hand it will take care of some of this work, and on the other hand it provides a platform to discuss what additional work needs to be oranised by the Alliance outside PARSE. PARSE has a work package called 'Community insight'. Two important steps include a survey of who is doing what in specific research communities and identifying differences and similarities as well as incentives and obstacles for a durable e-infrastructure. Next, two specific communities will be selected and case studies will be carried out in these communities.

In parallel it is worthwhile to investigate how the efforts to establish operational segments of the European Digital Information Infrastructure can be accelerated. In the middle of 2008 the NSF will fund the first DataNet projects aiming to do precisely that for particular communities. The Alliance will build on the PARSE participants and its own members to organise, in close cooperation with the Commission, a workshop in order to have an in-depth discussion on key elements for such plans and on estimates of the costs for developing and building such an infrastructure segment and operate it for, say, four years. Two outcomes are expected: first, outlines for a number of plans for establishing operational segments within a number of years, and, secondly, to identify concrete arguments and build support for making available much larger sums in the Infrastructure segment of FP7. Impact should be envisaged on the Review of the Financial Perspectives for the EU Budget due for 2009. The workshop will benefit from the first winners of the NSF DataNet Programme.

Through the workshop the Alliance will also contribute to enhancing the awareness of the need to actually build an operational infrastructure encompassing both data and documents, and to incorporate long-term preservation as a goal from the very beginning.

3. Coordination and stimulation of research and the development of tools
The R&D proposal that was drafted by the Task Force in 2005, needs to be updated. Part of the work identified in 2005 is now already being carried out with the EC-projects PLANETS, CASPAR, DRIVER and DPE, and probably several smaller specialised ones. At the same time the Alliance should ensure effective coordination between a variety of ongoing and new projects, many of them funded by the Framework Programme of the EU.

4. Developing the accreditation mechanism
This category of work is incorporated in the PARSE.Insight proposal under work package 6, 'Sustainability'. One of the strands there is aimed at reaching a common understanding of mechanisms to evaluate the sustainability and trustworthiness of e-infrastructure repositories.

5. Relations with countries outside Europe
The Alliance is watching closely strategic developments outside Europe (Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand, United States, etc.) that also aim to strengthen long-term preservation and access, as wewll as to coordinate previously scattered efforts.

The US National Science Foundation's Office of Cyberinfrastructure (OCI) has recently released a new call for proposals for 'Sustainable Digital Data Preservation and Access Network Partners' (DataNet). the DataNet seeks to foster the development of new types of organisations that integrate library and archival sciences, cyberinfrastructure, computer and information sciences, and domain science expertise.

Up to $100,000,000 plus indirect costs is available in this programme over a five-year period, with the possibility of a five-year renewal; it is anticipated that there will be around five grantees, with no single award exceeding $20,000,000. Funding is expected to ramp down for each project in successive years, encouraging the development of sustaining strategies. Although US academic and not-for-profit organisations must be the lead submitters, commercial partners are encouraged. Preliminary proposals must be submitted by 7 January 2008 and full proposals by 21 March 2008.

The Alliance will keep a close eye on these developments and will investigate possible participation of (members of) the Alliance in the DataNet programme.

6. Formalising and strengthening the AllianceThe strategy described above involves a lot of work and needs a durable structural base: a strong Alliance organisation. The Alliance needs more members, especially from the world of science and national funding organisations. The Alliance needs a formal legal basis. The Alliance needs a budget, based on contributions from its members. The Alliance needs strong management.
The Alliance was formally announced through a press launch at the time of the Brussels conference in 2007. The Alliance needs to make itself known, both within Europe and elsewhere in the world, which of course partly fits in with the activities under category 1. In order to achieve these aspirations the Alliance will carry out several activities:

6.1. Creating a Bureau
6.2. Advocacy
6.3. Public relations

7. Developing a business model

The Alliance aims to create a sustainable organisational infrastructure for permanent access to scientific information. This involves assessing what the operational costs of a permanent information infrastructure would be, as well as working with the science funding agencies, including the EU and national governments, to develop and implement realistic business models.
The Alliance itself will internally make a start to discuss and develop the contours of a funding strategy. This will entail gathering data on costs associated with digital repositories and preservation. A working group might be the best way to do this.