Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories Expanded

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ASSEMBLE Plus (Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories Expanded)

Okres sprawozdawczy: 2019-04-01 do 2020-09-30

ASSEMBLE Plus brings together 26 partners covering over 30 marine installations with modern research infrastructures and track records of unique service provision, from 14 European and two associated countries, under the leadership of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC), an ESFRI consortium developed from the previous ASSEMBLE (FP7) partnership.
ASSEMBLE Plus will provide scientists from academia, industry and policy with a quality-assured programme of access to its marine biological station facilities and resources. These stations offer a wide variety of services, including access to marine ecosystems, unique marine biological resources, state-of-the-art experimental and analytical facilities with integrated workflows, and historical observation data. The goal of the project is to stimulate fundamental and applied research excellence in Europe in the fields of marine biology and ecology, thereby improving the knowledge- and technology-base for the European bio-economy, policy shaping and education. The sum of the actions envisaged in ASSEMBLE Plus, including Access, Networking, and Research, will ultimately increase the number of users of marine biological stations and shape novel strategic development perspectives of the partners, to be based on effective integration and efficient complementarities, resulting in a key contribution to their long-term sustainability.
Transnational Access: where users can apply for funding to carry out projects at any of the ASSEMBLE Plus stations that are located in a different country to the users' home institute, or can request scientific material to be sent to them from a station.
Remote Access: where users can apply for funding to access services that do not require the applicant to be physically present.
Five Joint Research Activities are included in ASSEMBLE Plus: Genomic Observatories, Cryobanking, Functional Genomics, Development of Instrumentation, Scientific Diving, and we also host some of the pages for Ocean Sampling Day. ASSEMBLE Plus participates in the EC's Horizon 2020 Open Research Data Pilot, and in this context strives to provide all its data and publications as FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reuseable).

The specific objectives of ASSEMBLE Plus are to:
• Enhance transnational access to a coordinated set of state-of-the-art European infrastructures for marine biology and ecology;
The project has an overarching goal of facilitating and improving access to research facilities, expertise, and biodiversity for marine biological and ecological research. One of the primary mechanisms for achieving this is the Transnational Access (TA) programme.
• Improve service provision by the partners infrastructures in line with their areas of excellence in marine biology and ecology, with emphasis on developing novel key enabling technologies and data solutions;
An important component of the project has been to improve the tools and platforms available for marine biological and ecological research. The project has five Joint Research Activities (JRAs) which aim to develop new tools for researchers.
• Strengthen complementarity and interoperability within the consortium and with related infrastructures;
ASSEMBLE Plus is an important project for the consortium in teaching them how to work together and to successfully provide access to users from outside their institutions. A programme of workshops, staff exchanges, and mentoring has been implemented by Networking Activity 1 (Improving Access to Marine Stations), which has proven very successful in building relations and encouraging exchange of knowledge and know-how between the partners.
• Lay the logistical and strategic foundations to expand the coverage of the European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC) in both its scope and its geographical distribution and to consolidate its long-term sustainability.
Throughout the project, the consortium partners have been working with EMBRC-ERIC, learning about research infrastructures, service provision, platform development, and planning for long-term sustainability. Further activities are planned for developing a template business model for marine stations to aid them in ensuring the sustainability of these important installation, allowing the consortium partners to benefit from each other’s past experiences.

1. Researchers will have wider, simplified, and more efficient access to the best research infrastructures they require to conduct their research, irrespective of location. They benefit from an increased focus on user needs.
ASSEMBLE Plus is successfully delivering on this topic, having significantly improved the access to the consortium facilities through harmonised procedures for application and review of projects, regular calls for access promoted through all the partners’ communication channels, and much greater visibility of available platforms for access through the TA calls and the extensive catalogue of services available through the EMBRC website.
2. Operators of related infrastructures develop synergies and complementary capabilities, leading to improved and harmonised services.
The workshops, training courses, and staff exchanges has ensured that partners have been able to benefit from each other in areas of common interest, for example in the JRAs, and build lasting relationships and collaborations. The sharing of experiences has also allowed partners to develop the areas related to their particular competencies, for example in JRA3 on functional genomic tools, where a number of techniques have jointly been developed to genetically modify a broad selection of model organisms. These will all be available to the research and innovation communities even beyond the duration of ASSEMBLE Plus.
3. There is less duplication of services, leading to an improved use of resources across Europe. Economies of scale and saving of resources are also realised due to common development and the optimisation of operations.
Whereas a reduction in the duplication of services was envisaged, duplication of platforms is not necessary an issue in our distributed consortium.
Big efforts have been made in ASSEMBLE Plus to reach out and attract users from the private sector. Consequently, the consortium has seen users from -or with strong links with- the private sector, and users whose projects showed strong potential for application in the private sector.
5. A new generation of researchers is educated that is ready to optimally exploit essential tools for their research.
ASSEMBLE has been very successful in attracting early career scientists to its TA programme. In the second reporting period, 29% of applicants were PhD students and another 28% postdocs. Many projects were requesting access to expertise and platforms they wished to learn how to use or improve their skills on, including some of the new tools and techniques developed in the JRAs. T
6. Closer interactions between a larger number of researchers active in and around a number of infrastructures facilitate cross-disciplinary fertilisations and a wider sharing of information, knowledge and technologies across fields and between academia and industry.
Multiple mechanisms exist to foster collaboration and sharing of information.

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Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ASSEMBLE Plus (Association of European Marine Biological Laboratories Expanded)

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