Support for the opening of low-carbon energy research databases in Europe (CSA Coordination and support action) - LC-SC3-CC-3-2019

Deadline: Aug 27, 2019  
CALL EXPIRED

Recent advances in the collection and exploitation of large data sets open the possibility for major industrial and social innovations. The European Open Science Cloud initiative aims to maximise the incentives for sharing data and to increase the capacity to exploit them, to ensure that data can be used as widely as possible.

Increasing aspects of research in the transition to a low-carbon energy system in Europe rely on the collection, analysis and processing of large data sets. Insights, information and knowledge are increasingly extracted from data sets in individual sectors and in the combination of data from different sectors.

The challenge is to promote the opening of research databases for low-carbon energy in Europe, and to support a European-level approach to defining the development of future research data bases; this action focuses on the area of low-carbon energy. As the energy transition combines different scientific disciplines, particular attention has to be paid to agreed metadata in order to allow for the joint exploitation of data from these disciplines.

Proposals will develop together with energy research communities several of the items below:

• Development and use of data management practices that follow findable, accessible, interoperable, re-usable (FAIR) principles, and to the validation of data quality measures;
• Coordination of existing data repositories and databases, including those from SETIS and from the IEA;
• Access to tools to manage energy data with FAIR principles; promotion of open source access of such tools;
• Access to analytics to exploit energy data; promotion of open source access of such tools;
• Capacity building of data experts for the domain of low-carbon energy research;
• New research topics based on the analysis of large data sets in the energy domain;
• Trans-disciplinary research combining data from different domains and at different scales;
• Development of partnerships with industry to promote the opening of large datasets of interest to foster research into future technologies and services.

A broad coverage of the issues mentioned above is encouraged.

Recommendations that will be produced by the ongoing study on "Opportunities and barriers for opening of research databases in low-carbon energy research" should be taken into account.

Proposals should also follow developments of the European Open Science Cloud initiative, and plan to cooperate with and complement this activity.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 0.5 and 1 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

• Increasing/extending/widening the use of low-carbon energy research databases, particularly those from publicly financed R&I projects.
• Development of a critical mass of open research databases in Europe, and of researchers equipped with the know-how for the deployment, maintenance and exploitation of these.
• Easy and open access to these databases and to tools for their elaboration and exploitation, leading to increased efficiency of research investments.
• Strengthening of data-intensive research on low-carbon energy in Europe;
• Strengthening the development of industrial applications of data-intensive processes.

This activity directly aimed at supporting the development and implementation of evidence base for R&I policies and supporting various groups of stakeholders is excluded from the delegation to Executive Agencies and will be implemented by the Commission services.

Open Science

To be published in the first half of 2018 on https://bookshop.europa.eu/en/home/