On Tuesday 2 February, the team involved in Work Package (WP) 3 had its first meeting at the premises of WP leader KNAW-DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) at The Hague, The Netherlands.
There have been a few other occasions on which WP3 got together, but the real work on Common policies and implementation strategies will start from now. In PARTHENOS several work packages depend on each other for input and feedback. Especially Work Package 2 on Community involvement and requirements is of great importance to the work of the other WP’s and in many ways the backbone of the whole project. Recently WP2 delivered its first report on user requirements, which also fuels some of the work of WP3.
Aim of WP3
The aim of WP3 is to define shared policies and solutions of Research Infrastructures, projects and institutions, concerning issues of common interest, such as research data management, quality assessment of digital repositories, data and metadata, and issues relating to IPR, Open Access and Open Data. But the WP will also deliver a foresight study and research agenda, where identified gaps will find a place.
End objective
A shared feeling, expressed several times at the meeting, was that the real, end objective of WP3, and that of PARTHENOS, should be to support researchers, to help them to answer research questions. There is a concern that PARTHENOS and WP3 is competing with other RI projects. The focus should be on facilitating research, and listen to researchers, not research projects. However, from a WP3 perspective, by finding common policies and implementation strategies, and identifying best practice, current RI’s and projects could further improve which would benefit research.
Task leaders
After a presentation by Sara Di Giorgio and Paola Ronzino of the main findings of the report from WP2, all WP3 task leaders (Anders Sparre Conrad, Hella Hollander, here replaced by Maarten Hoogerwerf, Sara Di Giorgio, and Mark Hedges) gave an introduction to their tasks and planned activities. Special attention was given to the need to communicate outcomes among task leaders and to other WP’s. It is also important to understand that the WP will not undertake new work, but that it will integrate work from other projects. Identified gaps could perhaps be filled with interviews or surveys, or end up on the research agenda.
Independent
The results of WP3 will be especially important for WP5 on Interoperability and Semantics and WP6 on Services and Tools. But WP3 is also important in its own right, independent of the other PARTHENOS WP’s, because its goal is to give valuable advice to other RI projects and portals.
By the end of the day, WP3 had gone off to a good start and created serious foundations for the work ahead.