MINDtheGEPs takes a multidisciplinary multidimensional approach to challenging gender unbalances across five different countries with still traditional gender regimes (Italy, Spain, Serbia, Ireland, Poland) and across various types of Research Performing Organisations: 4 public universities (Turin, Tralee, Gdansk, Jagiellonian) and 1 public non-academic research institute (CNR); 1 academic (Belgrade) and 1 private technological institute center (Galicia). The consortium, led by the University of Turin’s CIRSDe, comprises also three non-implementing organizations bringing complementary expertise in monitoring and evaluation (Knowledge and Innovation), research communication (Uppsala University) and scientific publishing (Elsevier). In order to promote systemic institutional change and following the “no data-no policy” principle, the project will map the existing data and, building on the tools developed within an ongoing research project of the project coordinator, will produce new quali-quantitative evidence. On this basis, both structural and cultural actions can be effectively designed. At cultural level, the project will organize a virtuous chain of trainings, starting from across-partners "train the trainers" workshops to within-partners laboratories addressed to young women, but, endorsing the approach of "fixing the system not the women", also to men and senior researchers. At structural level, the project will introduce work-family measures addressed also to men, equality targets in decision-making boards and gender-sensitive research. The establishment of proper figures and bodies creates conditions for the endurance of GEPs beyond the project’s life. A multidisciplinary team (also including key-persons in middle or top management), coupled with a multi-skilled Advisory Board (including relevant national authorities), and 4 professional associations both in STEMM and SSH, will contribute to a successful change in RPOs and in society at large.

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 European Rare Diseases Research Alliance (ERDERA) aims to improve the health and well-being of the 30 million people living with a rare disease in Europe, by making Europe a world leader in Rare Disease (RD) research and innovation, to support concrete health benefits to rare disease patients, through better prevention, diagnosis and treatment. This Partnership will deliver a RD ecosystem that builds on the successes of previous programmes by supporting robust patient need-led research, developing new diagnostic methods and pathways, spearheading the digital transformational change connecting the dots between care, patient data and research, while ensuring strong alignment of strategies in RD research across countries and regions. Structuring goal-oriented public-private collaborations targeted at interventions all along the R&D value chain will ensure that the journey from knowledge to patient impact is expedited, thereby optimising EU innovation potential in RD. To support its ambition and missions ERDERA has been designed as a comprehensive and integrated ecosystem of which structure can be compared to an institute encompassing three main parts: (i) funding, (ii) internal (in house) Clinical Research Network that implements research activities targeting clinical trial readiness of RDs and accelerating diagnosis and translation of research discovery into improved patient care, and (iii) related supporting services (Data, Expertise, Education and Training) as well as an acceleration hub that serve external and internal RD community, all supported by all-embracing coordination and strategy and foundational (inter)national alignment.