AGINFRA PLUS D8.4 - AGINFRA Association Blueprint

The main purpose of this deliverable is to present the sustainability approach of the AGINFRA+ project results. Its target audience comprises representatives of external interested communities as well as the European Commission (i.e. main funder of the AGINFRA+ project). More precisely, the document examines three action lines, each dedicated to sustain a main output of the AGINFRA+ project, namely:

• Consultancy service to deploy and configure custom VREs for agri-food research communities: corresponds to Virtual Research Environments (VREs) that can be developed and deployed as a service to various agri-food communities based on (a) the D4Science infrastructure (https://www.d4science.org/) and (b) the customization of generic or domain specific services offered by various partners, which have been tested and validated with agri-food researchers during the project lifetime.
• Data Journals: corresponds to the two data journals that we have been set-up based on the ARPHA publishing platform (http://arphahub.com/), namely the Food Modelling Journal (https://fmj.pensoft.net/) and the Viticulture Data Journal (https://vdj.pensoft.net/)  
• Thematic VREs: corresponds to the four VREs that have been set-up during the project lifetime for supporting the three user communities of the project, namely (a) one VRE for Agro-Climatic and Economic Modelling community, (b) two VREs for the Food Safety Risk Assessment Community and (c) one VRE for Food Security Community     

Additionally, the report examines the management of AGINFRA+ after the end of the project funding. More specifically, although in the project DoA it has been proposed the establishment of a legal entity form (through a not-for-profit association) for the further operation and evolution of AGINFRA+ as a joint venture of involved stakeholders, it seems that this solution will not be operational considering the blend of the consortium partners involved. Thus, it has been considered among the partners that it will be better cost and operational wise to manage AGINFRA+ through a Memorandum of Agreement for a specified period (e.g. until December 2020) that will ensure that AGINFRA+ will be active in the EU infrastructures map and available to users with the support needed.      

Finally, the report concludes with the presentation of the foreseen next steps and the decisions that need to be further discussed among the consortium partners during the last year of the project towards finalizing the proposed sustainability plan of the project results.