Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - pp2EMBRC (European Marine Biology Resource Centre preparatory phase 2)

Teaser

EMBRC is a distributed infrastructure of marine biology and ecology, encompassing aquaculture and biotechnology, exploiting the latest “omics”, analytical and imaging technologies, and providing on site and remote scientific and technical services to the scientific...

Summary

EMBRC is a distributed infrastructure of marine biology and ecology, encompassing aquaculture and biotechnology, exploiting the latest “omics”, analytical and imaging technologies, and providing on site and remote scientific and technical services to the scientific community of the public and private sector.
EMBRC successfully completed a preparatory phase in early in 2014 with the production of a business plan and a memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed by 9 countries. An implementation phase was initiated with France chosen as host country. Since only institutions from 5 MoU signatory countries went through the preparatory phase, pp2EMBRC had as objectives: 1) to harmonize the access mechanism to the operational EMBRC-ERIC across all the partners, putting all the practical tools in place, including host contracts and single point online access platform, to enable EMBRC-ERIC to commence its access program when it becomes operational; 2) to put in place practical guidelines towards the full implementation of the new European and international legislation and commitments on Access and Benefit Sharing of the use of marine biological resources, thus providing clarity to future users of EMBRC-ERIC about their legal rights over obtained biological resources, and to position itself globally as a broker between users and the supplying countries ; 3) to focus the smart specialization of the regions and the opportunities marine biological resources offer for blue-biotech development and innovation, thus demonstrating the member states that EMBRC is a tool towards economic development of their maritime regions, enticing them to sign the EMBRC-ERIC, and prioritize its sustained support, particularly from regions which are now underrepresented in EMBRC.
As planned, the main outputs of the project were 1) a harmonized set of contract templates and a methodology for costing access to be included in the EMBRC-ERIC service level agreements with the national nodes, as well as the establishment of single entry online platform for users to apply to the infrastructure; 2) a MoU between EMBRC and the Conference of the Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR) to be signed shortly that underlines mutual commitment to promote marine biotechnology in the European maritime regions and the long term support of EMBRC by the CPMR; 3) dialogue with some countries (Ireland, Finland) to join the EMBRC-ERIC; 4) The establishment of best practice recommendations for EMBRC implementation of the Access and Benefit Sharing legislation; 5) dissemination of EMBRC activities in multiple contexts.

Work performed

The pp2EMBRC work plan was divided in four work packages.
Work package 1 (led by CCMAR) was dedicated to coordination and communication of the project. Project activities were initiated with a kick-off meeting (Kom) held in Paris, France, October 12-13, 2015 at the EMBRC headquarters with the presence of all partners. The Kom started with the presentation by the coordinator of an overview of project highlighting the content and timing of key deliverables and milestones, and their timing, as well as administrative procedures. Each work package planned in detail the work of the coming months and the contribution of each partner. Throughout the 12 months of project duration the management team maintained a close contact with work package leaders by e-mail, telephone or skype, receiving feedback and helping with organizational aspects and any issues as required. A project sub-webpage was setup at the EMBRC webpage (www.embrc.eu/pp2embrc) where information about the project and news were constantly added: entries of pp2embrc events/workshops with announcements, registrations; agenda and supporting documents, including presentations. Content was also added to social media EMBRC sites (www.facebook.com/embrc; www.twitter.com/embrc_eu) The management team with contribution from the partners produced two newsletters at month 6 and 12 (deliverables 1.1 and 1.2) which were distributed among partners and the EMBRC community.

Workpackage 2 “Procedure for setting up single entry service provision” had two main objectives: (1) to harmonize access procedures among partners and (2) to develop the single point access platform for EMBRC services.
The first objective included i) harmonization of service offer, in particular to ensure that the same designations are used by partners for similar services, ii) the calculation of service costs, and iii) contracts for user access.
For compilation and harmonization of service offer (Task 2.1 – Compilation of services provided by national nodes, led by UGENT) a questionnaire was initially sent to the partnership to collect the descriptions of the services offer. The resulting catalog of services and ontologies was presented and discussed at the workshop “Harmonization on access to services within EMBRC” organized in Bilbao, Spain, November 17, 2015. A harmonization procedure was carried out and the resulting catalog of services that EMBRC can provide to users was compiled and stored in database format: deliverable D2.1, “Integrated database of services” (UGENT)
The second harmonization procedure was the calculation of Full Economic Costs (Task 2.2 – Harmonized calculation of full economic costs across EMBRC led by CCMAR) from which to derive the estimation of user access costs. A manual and spreadsheet was produced which partners could use to calculate their infrastructure access costs and discussed and clarified at the “Access cost calculation workshop”, Olhão, Portugal, February 4-5, 2016. Results of the workshop were condensed in deliverable D2.2 “standardized full economic cost method of services” (CCMAR), which provided a common methodology for all EMBRC partners for cost calculation across.
Finally, the third harmonization procedure was Task 2.3 “Definition of hosting contracts” led by SZN. A series of contract templates to host users at marine stations and EMBRC laboratories were produced contemplating various types of users (academics, private), intellectual property, and several other aspects. The templates were circulated by e-mail for discussion and finally adopted as deliverable D2.3 “Hosting contracts (SZN).
Task 2.4 (Development of central web-based service-access system) led by UGENT and VLIZ produced the online access system allowing users to find services based on multiple entries and to compare similar services offered by different partners. It contains the electronic forms for user access application linked to the databases produced in task 2.1 with

Final results

pp2EMBRC made significant contributions to the development of the RI towards becoming an ERIC and becoming operational:
1) It contributed significantly towards harmonization of services offer by establishing a common services offer vocabulary, integration of services in a common database, defining standard contracts to be signed with users, defining a common base for cost calculation and establishing a central web-based service-access system. This will allow EMBRC to become operational as soon as ERIC status is approved as expected during the first half of 2017.
2) It established guidelines to ensure that all EMBRC culture collections are registered and comply with Access and Benefit Sharing legislation and the Nagoya protocol and that the material utilised has been obtained within the rules of law as well as providing the terms of use for the material. For users, by using these registered collections they can easily consult the relevant documentation and determine if they can legally conduct their research using those organisms, and thus demonstrate that they have exercised ‘due diligence’ in the eyes of the law. To further aid the user community it produced a white paper with best practice guidelines containing step-by-step guides on how to gain access to new organisms and obtaining a priori informed consent (PIC) from the source country. This will provide clarity for the user community on their legal obligations and facilitate access to biological resources, the core business of EMBRC.
3) It established collaborative links with maritime regions towards development of biotechnology and the efficient use of biological resources in their S3. This should lead to more regional funds to be made available for this purpose and to become more accessible to EMBRC. Furthermore, it took significant steps to bring new countries to embrace the EMBRC partnership. Broadening the partnership will result in a wider coverage of the European marine ecosystems and biological resources (with the objective of all European regional seas being represented). Altogether, these steps should strongly contribute towards sustainability of the EMBRC-ERIC and for significant socio-economic impact in the regions.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.embrc.eu/pp2embrc.