International Call for Projects in the frame of the Belmont Forum : Science-Driven E-Infrastructure Innovation (SEI) for the Enhancement of Transnational, Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Data Use in Environmental Change

The impact of environmental change research and data it produces can be dramatically increased through a transnational approach to critical methodological, technological and/or procedural barriers within the scientific community. In order to accelerate scientific discoveries and socioeconomic innovation, the exponential increase in diversity, volume and throughput of cross-border, multidisciplinary data in environmental sciences demand delivery mechanisms that allow these data to be more easily findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable for research, and that facilitate their sustainable curation and preservation for the benefit of future generations.

The capability to bring computer science and technology as well as large and complex data sets to bear on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary science is emerging. It is therefore critically important to establish and enable transnational frameworks so that data-driven scientific knowledge can transcend disciplines and geographical borders, ultimately increasing the scientific underpinnings of policy and action. International collaboration within Belmont Forum priority research fields holds the potential to establish international foundations for federated data integration and analysis systems with shared services, bring together best practices from the public and private sectors, foster open data and open science stewardship among the science communities including related areas such as publishing, and encourage data and cloud providers and others to adopt common standards and practices for the benefit of all.

For these reasons, the Belmont Forum is launching a 4-year competitive call for projects as part of its Collaborative Research Action (CRA) on Science-driven e-Infrastructure Innovation (SEI) for the Enhancement of Transnational, Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Data Use in Environmental Change. The SEI call will intimately link research thinking and technological innovation toward accelerating the full-path of discovery-driven data use and open science, and enables a broader scientific community to benefit from the identified new and potentially disruptive demonstrators or pilots toward solutions.

The countries and agencies funding today this call are: Brazil (FAPESP), France (ANR), Japan (JST), Taiwan (MOST), USA (NSF).

The SEI CRA will be implemented in a co-design and co-implementation approach by a “task force”, composed of external experts, representatives from the funded projects and from relevant organizations (e.g. RDA, Codata, GEO/GEOSS). It requires all funded projects to share results and participate in regular steering workshops (e.g., one per year), and to contribute to a knowledge hub catalyzing research efficiently with best practices, shared methods and their software implementation.

Further information about proposal requirements and eligibility, example of topics, consortia, evaluation criteria, and agenda can be founded in the Call Text and the BFgo website.