Five years ago, a global infrastructure to uniquely attribute to researchers their scientific artefacts (articles, data, software…) appeared technically and socially infeasible. Since then, DataCite has minted over 3.5m unique identifiers for data. ORCID has deployed an open solution for identification of contributors with over 850,000 registrants in less than 2 years. THOR will leverage these emerging global infrastructures to support the H2020 goal to make every researcher ‘digital’ and increase creativity and efficiency of research, while bridging the R&D divide between developed and less-developed regions. We will establish interoperability between existing resources, linking digital identifiers across platforms and propagating attribution information. We will integrate PID services across the research lifecycle and data publishing workflows in four advanced research communities, and then roll-out core services and service building blocks for the wider community. These open resources will foster an open and sustainable e-infrastructure across stakeholders to avoid duplications, give economies of scale, richness of services and the ability to respond rapidly to opportunities for innovation. THOR is not just relevant to the EINFRA-7-1024 Call, but will become a pervasive element of the EINFRA family of e-Infrastructure resources over the next 3 years. It will allow data-management and curation services to exploit knowledge of data location and attribution; provide robust and persistent mechanism for linking literature and data; enable search and resolving services and generate incentives for Open Science; deliver provenance and attribution mechanisms to underpin data exchange; and provide minting and resolving services for data citation workflows. Its impact will enable third-party services, no-profit and commercial, to leverage the scholarly record.

The goal of the FREYA consortium is to iteratively extend a robust environment for Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) into a core component of European and global research e-infrastructures. The resulting FREYA services will cover a wide range of resources in the research and innovation landscape and enhance the links between them so that they can be exploited in many disciplines and research processes. This will provide an essential building block of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Moreover, the FREYA project will establish an open, sustainable, and trusted framework for collaborative self-governance of PIDs and services built on them. FREYA capitalises on the successes of the THOR project and will build on the core services of the existing trusted PID systems of the project partners, developing them in the context of established community-based services and more widely through the EOSC. The FREYA e-infrastructure components will be built on technologies and services that are already well proven. New services, and new PID types, will be introduced and moved up the scale of Technology Readiness Levels, so that the emerging e-infrastructure services are prototyped and positioned for evolution beyond the end of the FREYA project. The vision of FREYA is built on three key ideas: the PID Graph, PID Forum and PID Commons. The PID Graph connects and integrates PID systems to create an information map of relationships across PIDs that provides a basis for new services. The PID Forum is a stakeholder community, whose members collectively oversee the development and deployment of new PID types; it will be strongly linked to the Research Data Alliance (RDA). The sustainability of the PID infrastructure resulting from FREYA beyond the lifetime of the project itself is the concern of the PID Commons, defining the roles, responsibilities and structures for good self-governance based on consensual decision-making.

FAIRCORE4EOSC focuses on the development and realisation of EOSC-Core components supporting a FAIR EOSC, addressing gaps identified in the SRIA. Leveraging existing technologies and services, the project will develop nine new EOSC-Core components aimed to improve the discoverability and interoperability of an increased amount of research outputs. FAIRCORE4EOSC will also contribute to the EOSC Interoperability Framework by establishing new guidelines on the new EOSC-Core components. The new components will be crucial to support the FAIR research life cycle. Five user-centric case studies (climate change, social sciences and humanities, mathematics, national research information systems, research data management communities) will drive the development and testing of the new components ensuring they are tailored to the user needs (co-design). All the selected case studies share similar challenges that are common to many other stakeholder groups: research communities at European and national level have datasets that currently cannot be found in the EOSC; they use Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) but they are lacking PIDs for different levels of aggregation; they use community specific services to manage metadata that make cross-discipline reuse and interoperability complex. The user stories and best practices drawn by the case studies will be used to foster uptake of the new components beyond the project partners. The 22 complementary partners of the FAIRCORE4EOSC consortium have long-lasting experience in the provision and development of research data services, persistent identifiers, metadata and semantic registries, services and tools to archive and reference research software. The partners have also significantly contributed to the EOSC SRIA and are active members of the EOSC Association Task Forces (TFs) providing the project a unique insight and capacity to boost the development of the Web of FAIR Data and Related Services.

FAIR-IMPACT focuses on expanding FAIR solutions across the EOSC. It builds on the results of FAIRsFAIR and other relevant projects and initiatives. The project aims to realise a FAIR EOSC, that is an EOSC of FAIR data and services. FAIR-IMPACT will identify proven domain solutions and facilitate the interoperable uptake of these solutions across scientific domains and for different types of research output. This includes the overall FAIRification of various research objects from assigning and managing identifiers, describing them with shared and common semantics to making them interoperable and reusable, as well as the challenge of projecting the FAIR principles to other types of research objects such as software. FAIR-IMPACT meets these challenges through three work packages which identify and adapt candidate approaches, tools and solutions suitable for wider adoption, and two work packages focussing on interoperability, adoption and support. Scientific communities are included in the consortium as integrated use case partners. This will ensure that viable and tested solutions from one domain can be piloted in others and help to achieve wider uptake, adoption, implementation of, and compliance with the FAIR principles. As the project unfolds, additional support mechanisms (cascading grants, in-kind support) will be introduced. The FAIR-IMPACT ambition is to build a web of FAIR data and related services together with the scientific community and relevant stakeholder groups, and to take steps towards realising the ambition of a web of Open Science. FAIR-IMPACT will contribute to transforming the way researchers share and exploit research outputs within and across research disciplines? and to the facilitation of scientific multi-disciplinary cooperation. With its focus on increasing FAIRness, FAIR-IMPACT will contribute to improving public trust and reproducibility in science.