Getting Involved with IBISBA

IBISBA is a distributed research infrastructure that provides R&D services to clients. Services are produced by facilities located in different European countries and owned and operated by various types of (mostly) public entities (e.g., universities, RTOs, CROs etc). Facility owners and/or operators wishing to get involved in IBISBA are advised to first peruse the internet site and get some understanding of what IBISBA does. A key document to consult is the Memorandum of Understanding (insert link once available). Having acquired basic understanding of what IBISBA aims to achieve, facility owners/operators are advised to follow the advice given below.

Step 1 - Contacting the national node

IBISBA’s community is mostly organized around national nodes (https://www.ibisba.eu/About/National-Nodes). These are coordinated at the European level by an entity known as IBISBA Central. Nodes are national-based clusters of research infrastructure facilities that benefit from official recognition both from national authorities and from IBISBA Central. Therefore, the first official step when wishing to join the IBISBA community is to contact the national representative of IBISBA. When the node is formally structured, the representative will be the node’s Director or Chairperson. Each node will have its own procedures regarding the inclusion of new facilities. Contacting the node will lead to a discussion about joining it. Membership of a national node automatically provides owners/operators with access to many of IBISBA’s activities and resources, but membership of a national node does not automatically infer inclusion of services in IBISBA’s pan-European catalogue (see below).

Step 2 - Joining the Memorandum of Understanding

Presently, IBISBA Central is an informal entity, without legal status. This means that its successful operation relies on the voluntary contributions of IBISBA network members. To support the operation of IBISBA Central and the IBISBA community at large, IBISBA’s founding members have drafted and signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). This agreement temporarily cements the IBISBA community, fixing some basic rules and calling for contributions. New parties can sign the MoU. In doing so they agree to abide by the rules and commit to the success of IBISBA. The MoU will remain valid at least until the acquisition of legal status by IBISBA Central. To access the MoU, a party (defined as a public or privately owned legal entity) must obtain consent from the MoU’s General Assembly. To do this, the request should be addressed to the Secretary (michael.odonohue@ibisba.eu). The request should explain the motivations of the candidate party and identify the ways in which it will commit to the success of IBISBA. Once received, the request will be processed and a decision reached within 45 calendar days. In the event of consent, the candidate party has 30 days to sign the accession document.

Step 3 - Contributing to the IBISBA pan-European catalogue

The IBISBA catalogue is composed of services that meet client demand, research quality and data management criteria and that are suitably configured for use in multiservice workflows. The latter are built to provide bespoke R&D service solutions to clients. To achieve this it is vital to identify stable hand-off points between individual services. This requires careful definition of service boundaries and metadata related to inputs and outputs. This process is called service modularization.