Open science practices can be used to create a new European community of important research infrastructures in the field of biodiversity. This is the aim of the EU-funded BiCIKL project. Projects themselves may also interact, in a synergic effort. This is exactly the case of the cooperation ongoing between VITALISE and BiCIKL.

BiCIKL will provide access to data in connection with new tools and services at each distinct level and along the entire research chain. The project will deliver new methods and workflows to combine access to harvesting, liberating, linking, accessing and reusing sub-article-level data derived from literature. BiCIKL will issue, for the first time, access and tools for continuous linking and usage tracking of data along the sequence from specimen, sequences, species, analytics, publications and biodiversity knowledge graph to reuse.

On the other side, VITALISE wants to address the challenge of convenient and open access to research infrastructures, so proposes the following macro objectives, which are aligned with the strategic goals of the Health and Wellbeing Living Labs Action Oriented Task Force of ENoLL, the EIT Health LLs and the Forum LLSA:

• Effective and convenient Transnational and Virtual access provided for research activities beyond the consortium partners. That is open access for researchers to conduct research by being physically present in one of the consortium’s Living Lab infrastructure or access and analyse remotely already collected data.
• Design and adopt beyond the state of the art ICT tools and e-infrastructures for data, computing and networking, and ensure connection to the European Open Science Cloud
• Knowledge sharing and training of researchers to optimally exploit all the essential Living Lab tools for their research
• Transnational Collaboration established among and beyond the consortium partners.

VITALISE outcomes are summarized in two (2) main complementary elements: 1) the ICT tools for providing effective and convenient Virtual Access to researchers, and 2) the improvement and harmonization of services and procedures provided to researchers.

That's why, on Thursday, 10 February 2022, the VITALISE Project Coordinator, Dr Evdokimos Konstantinidis, the Scientific Coordinator of the project, Prof. Panos Bamidis, Despoina Petsani (Harmonisation Board Coordinator) and Ada Pellumbaj (Dissemination and Communication Manager) met with Lyubomir Penev, the Project Coordinator of BiCIKL project and two members of the Project Management team, Anna Sapundzhieva and Kristina Hristova. They were ready to discuss opportunities and potential collaborations to open up European research infrastructures for Transnational Access to external researchers.

The main agenda items of the meeting were:

• Presentation of VITALISE Project and BiCIKL Project.
• Knowledge exchange for the optimisation of the process of providing Transnational Access to European researchers, as well as optimisation of the selection criteria for the applicants of the Open Calls.
• Exploration of opportunities to collaborate and promote the interests, goals and common good of both projects.
• The establishment of synergies to work collaboratively work on the communication and dissemination of the advances, outputs and outcomes of the two projects.
• The organisation of joint events between the two projects and in collaboration with other INFRAIA EU-funded projects to make European research infrastructures sustainable and open to the whole research community.

The discussion was very fruitful, with interesting outcomes and an essential exchange of knowledge. It looks like this synergy is going to work.