The Sumo-Chem H2020 proposal
Abstract
The Chemistry community, one of the oldest research communities in computational applications, has never had any EU funded e-infrastructure project funded as a community in H2020. Despite the efforts spent in the past to assemble a Virtual Organization (COMPCHEM) and a Virtual Research Community (VRC) it still appears like an archipelago of isolated “islands” of research facilities and e-infrastructure resources that are not available for the whole community. The Sumo-Chem project submitted on March 2016 to the European Research Infrastructures (including e-Infrastructures) INFRAIA-02-2017 call: Integrating Activities for Starting Communities was designed to integrate research facilities and infrastructures with computing and data resources into a common Research Infrastructure (RI) to enable joint research involving Computational and Experimental Chemistry and other research communities. This RI was designed to have an open architecture to allow its extension with further research facilities and resources to be used by the Chemistry and other communities and to allow researchers and developers to run industrial simulations and scientific experiments using European, regional and national research facilities and e-infrastructure resources through an intuitive and seamless virtual access considering different levels of their expertise and skills. The major innovation of the project was meant to be in management of scientific data covering the whole lifecycle of data using metadata, ontologies and provenance based on advanced data and computing services.
Rejection of the proposal, despite a highly positive evaluation (8.5/10), has deprived the community of Molecular Sciences of a key instrument to create a Research Infrastructure to support Open Science in this community.
The proposal although rejected was evaluated positively (8.5/10) with the following comments:
EXCELLENCE: The objectives of the project are described clearly and concisely, and the methodology proposed to address them is very convincing. The overall concept of connecting experimental and computational chemistry communities and infrastructures is sound. The project is innovative and ambitious in its aims with a clear potential to go beyond the state of the art. Due to the described selection of use cases, multi-disciplinary of the whole project is inherent. Networking activities are well developed and convincingly described. On a less positive note, while the joint research activities are mentioned in the proposal, their nature is unclear including the capacity to improve the services throughout the JRAs. In addition, the description of Trans-National Access is limited, in particular that of the physical access to experimental research facilities, where the access procedures and the quantity are not depicted in detail.
IMPACT: The proposal has high potential for addressing the expected impact criteria, as well as having the potential for positive impact outside of the immediate chemistry community. The involvement of SME in the consortium has the potential for enhanced innovation and exploitation impact. However, it is less clear how readily the infrastructure would be accessed by the wider industrial community during the project. The training and development of young researchers is foreseen via the summer schools, and particularly through virtual access for the wider community. Cross-disciplinary fertilisation of concepts and ideas can also be expected in the proposed project. Together with a strong focus on standardisation of procedures, which will enable better offer of services to a wide community, an improved transparency of research data (via the use of metadata) is an important point of the proposal with positive impact. A minor negative aspect is the possible complementarity/duplication with services already provided outside the context of the project, a point that is not clearly addressed in the proposal.
