A partner search service on the Participant Portal?

Peter HÄRTWICH

European Commission RTD J.3

A partner search service on the Participant Portal?

Peter HÄRTWICH

European Commission RTD J.3

Research and Innovation

Research and Innovation

1

Introduction

• Purpose of the study: provide evidence base for a decision on the phase out of the CORDIS partner search facility and a potential successor

• Means:

• Assess the main existing partner search services

• Analyse the needs of the stakeholders

• Recommend possible scenarios and solutions

2

Existing services analysed

3

Service Research domains/ programmes Number of user profiles

EEN Cooperation Opportunities Database

All H2020, FP7, Consumer programme, COSME, Creative Europe, EUREKA, Eurostars, Health programme, other EU-funded programmes

20,000

Idealist ICT in H2020/FP7, ETNA, EEN 14,500

Fit for Health Biotechnology, health 10,117

CORDIS All H2020/FP7 4,832

NMP partner search NMP (future: climate, environment, energy) 2,000

IMI partner search Partnerships for projects of Innovation Medicines Initiative

1,965

Specialised social networks

Social network Services Number of registrations

Academia.edu Social network enabling researchers to connect with colleagues, post their own publications, and track the readership of their work.

18 million signed up

ResearchGate Social network for scientists to engage in collaborative discussions, peer review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, & upload raw data sets.

6 million members

BiomedExperts (Elsevier took over in late 2014 and encouraged users to change to alternative site Mendeley)

Social networking & expert finding service in biomedicine; Profiles are automatically generated from last 10 years of published articles in PubMed.

1.8 million

• It is important to note that ResearchGate has the most repeat visits. According to the" Online collaboration: Scientists and the social network" article (Van Noorden, 2014).

Key services provided by existing partner search services

• Create a profile as organisation or individual

• Search partners to prepare a proposal for a particular topic/call

• Offer or search for particular expertise (not call related)

• Quality assurance for data

• E-mail notifications related to the services

• Make your articles and research available and manage related discussions (social networks)

• Info days, brokerage events, trainings & social networking (e.g. Linkedin) to support forming partnerships

5

Requirements for a potential PP partner search service

6

• Offer a possibility to find partners to cooperate in EU funded projects

• Offer a partner search tool covering all programmes published on PP, all scientific fields and all H2020 priorities

• Make maximal use of available data in EC grant management systems to facilitate partner search functions.

• Enhance partner search results by using available data in EC (public and not public) in the matchmaking algorithm

Requirements for a potential PP partner search service (2)

7

• Quality - keep profiles and partners searches up to date and relevant

• Guarantee equal treatment of participants

• Provide standard interfaces to other partner search services to enable the use of public PP data on their partner search sites

Potential scenarios for PP partner search

8

Scenario 1: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; no replacement on the Participant Portal (PP)

Scenario 2: Migrate the CORDIS partner search “as it is” to PP

Scenario 3: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; Provide specific partner search functions on the PP exploiting the assets of the Commission’s project, organisation and expert data bases; complementing other partner search tools

Scenario 4: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; Offer via the PP a full service to potential partners covering all features and with the same quality as they are currently offered by the NCP/EEN networks

Potential scenarios for PP partner search

9

Scenario 1: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; no replacement on the Participant Portal (PP)

Scenario 2: Migrate the CORDIS partner search “as it is” to PP

Scenario 3: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; Provide specific partner search functions on the PP exploiting the assets of the Commission’s project, organisation and expert data bases; complementing other partner search tools

Scenario 4: Phase-out of CORDIS partner search; Offer via the PP a full service to potential partners covering all features and with the same quality as they are currently offered by the NCP/EEN networks

500 000persons

50 000organisations

27 000projects

1 000call topics

60 000experts

PIC

ECAS ID

Proposal/Project ID

Expert ID

Topic IDTopic tag

OECD keyword

Abstract

Title

IAM role DOI

Publishable summary

Topic Title

Topic Description

Org. data

Main approach for a potential partner search on the PP

- Create automatically organisation profiles and person profiles from the wealth of data available in the Commission systems

- Provide powerful search for querying the profiles

- Provide possibility for owners of the profiles (i.e. LEAR of organisation or the individual linked to the person profile) to enrich the profile with further information and to link it to the work programme, calls, topics structure for concrete cooperation requests

- Provide possibility to create new profiles from scratch

Organisation profile (PIC)

Automatic:- Basic organisation data from organisation registry- List of grants (clickable, leading to public project

info)- Cooperation network (10 most frequent partners);

clickable, leading to organisation profiles- Keyword and tag cloud

• Options for completion by LEAR (or self-registrant):

- Keywords, other websites, proposal ideas…

Draft!

Person profile (ECAS ID)Not publicly visible by default; explicit consent to be declared

• Automatic:- First, last name; e-mail- Linked organisation(s) (clickable)- List of proposals and grants (clickable)- Keyword and tag cloud- Publications (from expert profile)

• Options for completion:• Gender; address, phone(s), publications, keywords,

website, IDs in social networks…, proposal ideas

Draft!

Conclusion- Build a system based on existing assets: data bases of

organisations, projects, persons, experts, call topics, reports, publications

- Automatic creation of profiles of organisations and persons

- Powerful search for profiles

- Possibility to create profiles from scratch or to enrich existing profiles

- Standardised interface for re-use of structured data by external stakeholders ("JSON" files)

Questions

- Do researchers in your organisation use partner search services (like the one on CORDIS) for forming consortia for H2020 proposals?

- What key information would you look for in an organisation profile for finding partners for research proposals?

- If you are managing an existing partner search service, what are your expectations to the service that the Participant Portal should provide in the future?