24 June 2022
The first BiCIKL Call for Expression of Interest for biodiversity data-related scientific proposals is open until 31 July 2022.
The BiCIKL project invites submissions of Expression of Interest (EoI) to the First BiCIKL Open Call for projects. The purpose of this call is to solicit, select and implement four to six biodiversity data-related scientific projects that will make use of the added value services developed by the leading Research Infrastructures that make the BiCIKL project.
The BiCIKL project establishes a European starting community of key Research Infrastructures, researchers, citizen scientists and other stakeholders in the biodiversity and life sciences based on open science practices through access to data, tools and services.
Objective of the Call for Projects
The work we foresee with the selected projects is twofold:
- Address specific scientific or technical biodiversity data challenges presented by the applicants and,
- Understand how the BiCIKL Community can better support the scientific questions that arise from across the biodiversity world in the future.
What kind of support does BiCIKL offer?
The key feature of Transnational Access (TNA) is the provision of services to user groups from country(-ies) different from the host country of the RI installation. Access will be provided through remote transnational (no visits needed) access to data from at least two of the participating RIs requested by the user group.
The specific support provided to users will vary depending on the infrastructure and is described individually below. Broadly speaking, it is foreseen that support will include the in-kind provision of mostly virtual services, free of charge to the successful applicant. These services may include:
-
Assisting with access to data (for instance via large or complex queries, including Linked Open Data and SPARQL)
-
Assisting with access to collections and specimen data
-
Data management and archiving or support with the use of complex bioinformatics tools (sequence assembly, clustering and annotation)
-
Publications using semantically interlinked data between several RIs in the Biodiversity Data Journal
-
Automatic text and data mining and annotation pipelines for full-text articles with semantic search engines
-
Provide access to liberated data from publications in formats that allow further annotation or text and data mining
-
Support of data mobilisation, data quality and data enrichment measures.
There will be a limited possibility for physical access to some of the participating collections, however, travel and accommodation costs will not be funded.
Eligibility of the project proposals
- Proposals must address a topic of relevance to biodiversity research, in its broadest sense, although the final scope may narrow this to a particular area, depending on the skill sets available to the project. Proposers may wish to review the pilot project web pages (see below) which give a flavour of the type of project BiCIKL will be able to address.
- Proposals must include data and services arising from at least 2 of the infrastructures that are represented in the BiCIKL project (See BiCIKL web site), as this is a core aim of the BICIKL community (i.e. to link diverse data types together in new ways)
- Proposals must be submitted by a bona fide researcher, employed through a recognised scientific organisation in any country world-wide.
- Whilst we welcome proposals from outside the European Union, ultimately we will only select a maximum of one such project.
- Submission of more than one proposal with the same lead(s) is not excluded.
- Work included in a proposed BiCIKL study must be significantly different from work funded by other sources although it may build on work from previous funding.
- There is no scope for the project proposers, or their institute, to receive funding. The projects should describe work that can be done on their behalf by the BiCIKL partners.
- Services supplied as part of the project must be used by the applicant before the end of the BiCIKL project itself.
Click on the button below to find example projects and more information about the call.
(*) This short article replicates the one published on BiCIKL’s website on June 10th 2022.