Access to facilities, FAIR data and related services: the ITINERIS project

The Italian Integrated Environmental Research Infrastructures System (ITINERIS) Project started in November, and it will build the Italian Hub of Research Infrastructures in the environmental scientific domain providing access to data and services and supporting the Country to address current and expected environmental challenges. ITINERIS coordinates a network of national nodes from 22 RIs (18 from the environmental domain, 2 from agri-food with strong link with the environment and 2 from the PSE domain, supporting services for the marine domain).

ITINERIS has been designed looking at synergy with the European RI framework, and it will support the participation of Italian scientists in pan-European initiatives (ENVRI-FAIR, EOSC) and in HE (Pillar 1, Missions, Partnerships, Clusters). ITINERIS will have significant impact on national environmental research, providing scientific support to the design of actionable environmental strategies. ITINERIS adopts a whole-system, cross-disciplinary approach to the Earth System and its changes, allowing users to benefit from the integrated system of RIs and the knowledge it produces. This broad-scale vision of environmental research, sustained by the main Italian environmental scientists involved in European RIs, is truly innovative and it will support our Country in taking a leading role in European environmental research, designing the framework for the next decades.

A specific objective will be focused on the access to facilities, FAIR data and related services connecting the established network of distributed national environmental research infrastructures to as wide as possible user community. Following a user-centric approach and in accordance with the RIs’ network technical capability and mission, access services to the national RIs’ facilities and FAIR resources (data, services and other research outputs) will be set up. Most of the 22 RIs participating in ITINERIS already offer data and services from and across different domains of the Earth system - Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, Terrestrial Biosphere and Geosphere through different systems, protocols, portals and different access and FAIRification procedures.

ITINERIS builds upon this current effort to improve Access management and FAIRness, developing the conditions for harmonizing standards, metadata and policies amongst the different RIs. It has to be considered that involved RIs are very diverse and on different levels of maturity but face similar challenges in their operations in regard to FAIR compliance and Access management.