NeIC 2019 Annual Report
2019 was an eventful year for NeIC, bringing several new developments which have helped strengthen NeIC as an organisation and increased its Nordic impact. In the following, we would like to share some of our highlights from 2019.
After years of careful planning and thought, our strategy process culminated in an updated strategy for the 2020–2025 period. Our new strategy puts emphasis on four elements that will be our focus for the next six years:
- To ensure that all our collaborations are as beneficial as possible to all partners involved.
- To focus on people as the core of NeIC. We recognise what a great asset the NeIC staff is, and will focus on ensuring that we engage and maintain highly skilled and motivated people.
- To ensure that our influence in the Nordic region is geared towards improving and advancing e-infrastructure for research and for society.
- To ensure that our processes are effective and conducive to support well-functioning collaborations.
2019 also saw the launch of the new EOSC-Nordic project, aimed at facilitating coordination of relevant European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploiting synergies to achieve greater harmonisation of policy and service provisioning. The project seeks to establish the Nordic and Baltic countries as frontrunners in the take-up of the EOSC concept, principles and approach. EOSC-Nordic is funded under the EU framework programme Horizon 2020 and coordinated by NeIC on behalf of a strong consortium of 24 partners across Europe.
We were very excited to include a new country as a member of NeIC. NeIC has enjoyed several years of fruitful collaboration with Estonia, and we are now delighted to welcome them as a new member country and as a member of the NeIC Board. Estonia is bringing highly relevant knowledge and experience to the table. We are confident this will benefit the Nordic region, and we are excited about what this will bring to NeIC in the time to come.
Sharing knowledge and experience with others is something we value at NeIC. During 2019 NeIC project staff trained more than 600 people on topics as varied as FAIR data stewardship, project management, research software development tools and practices, and e-infrastructure tools related to topics such as earth system modelling and biodiversity. We hope this will contribute to better use of e-infrastructure across the Nordic region.
Although we are thrilled about these new developments, most of all we celebrate the everyday, ongoing efforts of all our projects and the work being carried out to advance the e-infrastructure field in the Nordic region. You can read more about what each of the projects has worked on and achieved in 2019 throughout this report. We hope you will enjoy the read.