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Mechanisms and sources of funding for European Research Infrastructure Consortiums (ERICs) are diverse, complex and can be challenging to identify and to use. This paper provides a roadmap for Research & Development (R&D) within the pre-commercial procurement (PCP) framework and the landscape of funding for ERICs available from the European Union with a perspective on other tracks of funding. Our objective is to offer a starting point and underline opportunities and challenges, for existing and future ERICs. The work presented in this paper results from the research carried-out for the business model of the DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) ERIC, which is currently in its transition phase and will be constructed in the following years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The genus Enchodelus is an intriguing free-living dorylaimid nematode taxon. Its representatives display a distinct distributional pattern as they are mainly spread in high altitudinal enclaves of the Northern Hemisphere, being often associated with mosses and cliff vegetation. Although their feeding habits have not been studied with experimental protocols, it is traditionally assumed that they are omnivorous.The genus Enchodelus has not been recently revised; descriptions of many 'old species' (that have been described long ago and have not been reported since their original discovery) are of poor quality, hardly discoverable and do not conform to the nowadays taxonomical standards. Thus, a comprehensive compilation and analysis of their literature data is indispensable to provide new insights into the taxonomy of the genus and to elucidate its evolutionary relationships., New Information: This contribution provides a cyber catalogue of all Enchodelus species, 28 in total. It compiles available information from the key European Research Infrastructures, such as TreatmentBank, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics Literature Services (SIBiLS), the Catalogue of Life (CoL), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and Biodiversity Literature Repository (BLR). Data about their distribution (geographical records and habitats) are incorporated too and all brought together. It is completed with discussion and notes for some species, along with information on species distributions and microhabitats. Here, all available information on Enchodelus species is brought together. This will contribute to a more complete assessment of species diversity and distribution and support further biogeographical and ecological research.Besides, type material Enchodelusvestibulifer Altherr, 1952, deposited in the Museo Cantonale di Storia Naturale di Lugano (Switzerland), is re-examined and the species is considered as incertae sedis . Further, a new species of the genus found in Caucasus, Georgia is described after its morphological and molecular study; also morphological and molecular data for E.macrodorus (de Man, 1880) Thorne, 1939, the type species of the genus, collected from Spain are provided., (Milka Elshishka, Aleksandar Mladenov, Stela Altash, Sergio Álvarez-Ortega, Reyes Peña-Santiago, Vlada Peneva.)

This document is an edited version of the original application for inclusion of a strategic research infrastructure project in the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. The application entitled "Polish network of research infrastructure for plant phenotyping" was submitted to the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education in June 2018; the project was not included in the Roadmap published in January 2020. The original document did not contain this abstract.

This document is an edited version of the original application for inclusion of a strategic research infrastructure project in the Polish Roadmap for Research Infrastructures. The application entitled "Polish network of research infrastructure for plant phenotyping" was submitted to the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education in June 2018; the project was not included in the Roadmap published in January 2020. The original document did not contain this abstract. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Horizon 2020 project Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) (started 1st of May 2021, duration 3 years) will build a new European community of key research infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in biodiversity and life sciences. Together, the BiCIKL 14 partners will solidify open science practices by providing access to data, tools and services at each stage of, and along the entire biodiversity research and data life cycle (specimens, sequences, taxon names, analytics, publications, biodiversity knowledge graph) (Fig. 1, see also the BiCIKL kick-off presentation through Suppl. material 1), in compliance with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) data principles. The existing services provided by the participating infrastructures will expand through development and adoption of shared, common or interoperable domain standards, resulting in liberated and enhanced flows of data and knowledge across these domains. BiCIKL puts a special focus on the biodiversity literature. Over the span of the project, BiCIKL will develop new methods and workflows for semantic publishing and integrated access to harvesting, liberating, linking, and re-using sub-article-level data extracted from literature (i.e., specimens, material citations, sequences, taxonomic names, taxonomic treatments, figures, tables). Data linkages may be realised with different technologies (e.g., data warehousing, linking between FAIR Data Objects, Linked Open Data) and can be bi-lateral (between two data infrastructures) or multi-lateral (among multiple data infrastructures). 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 output of BiCIKL will the future Biodiversity Knowledge Hub (BKH), a onestop portal, providing access to the BiCIKL services, tools and workflows, beyond the lifetime of the project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European Natural Science Collections (NSC) are part of the global natural and cultural capital and represent 80% of the world bio-and geo-diversity. Data derived from these collections underpin thousands of scholarly publications and official reports (used to support legislative and regulatory processes relating to health, food, security, sustainability and environmental change) and let to inventions and products that today play an important role in our bio-economy. In the last decades, the research practice in natural sciences changed dramatically. Advances in digital, genomic and information technologies enable natural science collections to provide new insights but also ask for changing the current operational and business models of individual collections held at local natural history museums and universities. A new business model that provides unified access to collection objects and all scientific data derived from them. Although aggregating infrastructures like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GenBank and Catalogue of Life now successfully aggregate data on specific data classes, the landscape remains fragmented with limited capacity to bring together this information in a systematic and robust manner and with scattered access to the physical objects. The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) represents a pan-European initiative, and the largest ever agreement of natural science museums, to jointly address the fragmentation of European collections. DiSSCo is unifying European natural science collections into a coherent new research infrastructure, able to provide bio- and geodiversity data at the scale, form and precision required by a multi-disciplinary user base in science. DiSSCo is harmonising digitisation, curation and publication processes and workflows across the scientific collections in Europe and enables linking of occurrence, genomic, chemical and morphological data classes as well as publications and experts to the physical object. In this paper we will present the socio-cultural and governance aspects of this research infrastructure. DiSSCo is receiving political support from 11 countries in Europe and will gradually change its funding model from institutional to national funding, with temporary funding from the EC to support the preparation and development. Solutions to achieve large scale digitisation are currently designed in the EC funded ICEDIG project to underpin the future large scale digitisation carried out by the countries. Unified virtual (digitisation on demand) and transnational physical access to the collections is over the next four years being developed in the EC funded SYNTHESYS+ project. The governance of DiSSCo is designed to gradually change from a steering committee composed of a few large natural history museums contributing in cash to initiate the development into a legal entity in which national consortia are represented, with a central coordination office for daily management. Each country individually decides how its entities (scientific collection facilities, research councils, governmental bodies) are organised in their national consortium. A stakeholder and user forum, Scientific Advisory Board and International Advisory Board will ensure that DiSSCo will be functional in enabling science across disciplines and within the international landscape of infrastructures. Training and short scientific missions are being developed in the MOBILISE COST Action to build capacity in FAIR data production, publication and usage of scientific collectionderived data in Europe and to initiate the socio-cultural changes needed in the collectionholding institutes. A Helpdesk is being constructed in the SYNTHESYS+ and DiSSCo Prepare projects to further facilitate the use and scientific use cases have been collected in ICEDIG to develop and facilitate e-services tailored to scientific needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Imagine you are a scientist, working on collections. You have your pet taxon and you need information which is distributed in a number of books and publications but also in the specimens deposited in Museums or Herbaria. Instead of paying visits to these establishments, around the world, you wish there was a means to transform all the information you need into a digitized form of the physical objects, you can reach from the screen of your laptop, tablet or cell phone. You dream you were able to watch, inspect and even dissect the type material you need online but also to compare it with others they way sequences are blasted against large databases, these days. You plan to make global research on this taxon and try to derive patterns from both the molecular and organismal level of the biological organization and to link the patterns resulting to the drivers of change for this taxon. This is the vision of the Virtual Museum of Natural History and one of the ways to achieve this vision is to address the "collections on demand" requirement. One of the possible means to address this requirement is the digitization through the use of the micro-ct technology. The micro-CT virtual laboratory (vLab), developed by LifeWatchGreece research infrastructure (RI), makes it possible the online exploration and dissemination of micro-CT datasets, which are only rarely made available to the public due to their large size and a lack of dedicated online platforms for the interactive manipulation of 3D data. This presentation shows the development of such a "collections on demand" function, implemented by the SYNTHESYS+ project (DiSSCo RI), which combines such highthroughput technologies, that is micro-ct and genomics, to address the scientific community's requirements. We show that this approach to combine patterns deriving from the application of novel techniques, which represent different kinds of observations is possible and we propose certain case studies as examples. The innovation aspects of this function include: #8226; Expansion and development of cost models for Collections on Demand; #8226; Development of standards and guidelines for exchange of collection-derived imaging data; #8226; Construction of new data pipelines and standard workflows, enabling access to complex digital content such as 3D scans; #8226; Development of novel molecular lab protocols, workflows and informatics pipelines, to enable large scale; #8226; DNA sequencing of NH collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Infrastructures (RIs) are facilities, resources and services used by scientists to perform research and support innovation. A number of EU research infrastructures [e.g. e- Science and Technology European Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research (LifeWatch) European Research Iinfrastructures Consortium (ERIC); The European lifesciences Infrastructure for biological Information (ELIXIR); the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC ERIC); the European Research Infrastructure for Imaging Technologies in Biological and Biomedical Sciences (uroBioImaging ERIC)] have been building Virtual Research Environments (VREs), which include many virtual laboratories (vLabs) offering, one stop data access to scientists, high computational capacity and collaborative research platforms in support of the requirements of the digital science. This presentation gives examples on the use of the vLabs developed by LifeWatch ERIC which have subsequently been taken up as web services by other RIs. The RvLab operates on a high-performance computer cluster, and has been used in order to analyse various properties of taxon equality, with a focus on marine species. This taxonomic information on marine biota is organized and made publicly available through the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) that delivers more than 250,000 described valid species names. Although scientists consider an equal status (in terms of contribution to overall diversity) to each taxon used in taxonomy, biogeography, ecology and biodiversity, the question "are all taxa equal?" has never been tested at a global scale. We present evidence that this question can be addressed by applying relatedness indices (Taxonomic Distinctness) over the entire WoRMS metazoan tree. The virtual micro-CT laboratory (Micro-CT vLab), which can be used by the members of the scientific community interested in the digitisation methods and biological collections, makes the micro-CT data exploration of natural history specimens freely available over the internet. Micro-CT vLab makes it possible the online exploration and dissemination of micro-CT datasets, which are only rarely made available to the public due to their very large size and a lack of dedicated online platforms supporting the interactive manipulation of 3D data. Examples of how these vLabs can be used by other RIs are provided [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last few decades, the research practice in natural sciences has changed dramatically. Remote sensing, rapid identification and molecular approaches allow us to efficiently monitor the changing world around us and understand the cause of those changes. Advances of digital, genomic and information technologies enable natural science collections to provide novel discoveries and ask for new collection types and attributes, while fostering the development of innovative approaches to face the urgent societal challenges. Natural Science Collections (three billion specimens globally) represent an unparalleled scientific asset. They constitute a unique source of diverse data classes, including genomic, chemical, morphological and geo-spatial information. Despite existing successful examples of infrastructures, aggregating and publishing specific data classes (such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GenBank or the Encyclopedia of Life - TraitBank), the landscape remains fragmented with limited capacity to bring together this information in a systematic and robust manner. The Distributed System of Scientific Collections (DiSSCo) represents a pan-European initiative, and the largest ever agreement of natural science museums, to jointly address the fragmentation of European collections. DiSSCo is set to unify European natural science collections into a coherent new research infrastructure, able to provide bio- and geodiversity data at the scale, form and precision required by a multi-disciplinary user base. At the heart of the technical implementation of DiSSCo, is the development of a cloud-based non-relational data store that links occurrence, genomic, chemical and trait data classes, by robustly and unambiguously anchoring each data object back to the physical object. By harmonising digitisation, curation and publication processes and workflows, across all its nodes, DiSSCo can populate and serve a knowledge graph for European natural science collections. In this paper we will introduce the vision, mission and objectives of DiSSCo, discuss the technical approach and touch upon the socio-cultural and governance aspects supporting this large-scale European endeavour. DiSSCo is applying for inclusion in the 2018 European roadmap for research infrastructures, through an evaluation process organised by the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). This process is politically and/or financially supported by 12 European countries and an expanding network of 95 natural science museums in 20 countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]