Building a framework for a sustainable transatlantic cooperation in the field of research infrastructures

Developing world-class research infrastructures for environmental research is one of the top priorities of European authorities. This proposal brings together scientists and users being involved in Europe’s major environmental related research infrastructure projects, i.e. EISCAT, EPOS, LifeWATCH, EMSO, and ICOS, with their US counterparts that are responsible for the NSF funded projects AMISR, EARTHSCOPE, DataONE, OOI and NEON. The intention is that by interlinking these activities new synergies are generated that will stimulate the creation of a truly global integration of existing infrastructures. The key of this integration process will be the efficient access to and the open sharing of data and information produced by the environmental research infrastructures. This important crosscutting infrastructure category is subject to rapid changes, driven almost entirely outside the field of environmental sciences. Trends in this area include growing collaborations between computer and environmental scientists, leading to the emergence of a new class of scientific activity structured around networked access to observational information. Therefore links to running projects like ENVRI in Europe or EARTHCUBE in the US who are developing relevant architectures are indispensable. Considering this perspective the COOPEUS project will serve as a testbed for new standards and methods. Interoperability concepts and the development of e-infrastructures for the environmental ESFRI projects will beyond data
also include the tools that scientist use for analyzing the data. The new term that describes this new quality
in cooperation is “interworkability” which means that interoperability is extended to the exchange of concepts between individual scientists. The COOPEUS project will act as an incubation chamber for new sustainable concepts in this field. The main outcome will be to develop MoUs that will determine future cooperation strategies between the research infrastructures.