BioExcel-1 Deliverable D4.6 – Final report on dissemination and training

This document describes the dissemination, collaboration and training activities that have been completed during the second period of the BioExcel Centre of Excellence and provides an estimate of the impact that has been achieved by these activities. The dissemination section presents information about the project website, social media channels, dissemination events and publications.

The website has been the main medium for collecting and disseminating information. It attracted on average 1000 visitors/month, 64000 views during the reporting period. The general BioExcel mailing list now has close to 1000 subscribers, while the different Interest Groups (IGs) have between 50-90. Our twitter feed is another major outreach channel with close to 1000 followers and over 1100 tweets to date (top performer among the CoEs).

During the second reporting period, BioExcel has contributed to over 40 dissemination and training events, reaching an estimated 24, 683 people for dissemination and 517 for training. 20 publications have been co-authored by BioExcel personnel or acknowledge our support and services. We present an overview of the Memorandums of Understanding (9 finalized and 2 planned) that have been signed with key EU and US organizations and the impact of the collaborations. We provide a brief update on the activities of the Training Interest Group, the activities during the second period have centered on spreading the word of the methodology used for the BioExcel training programme by working with specific initiatives such as the IMAbs consortium and the ELIXIR implementation study “Developing learning paths for users of ELIXIR services”.

For the face-to-face training events that were completed during the second period, we discuss the event structure and the post-course feedback. The three BioExcel training events, reported on in this deliverable, have been rated as "Good" or "Excellent" by, respectively, 91%, 94% and 100% of the participants. We present the results of the training impact assessment using long-term feedback surveys at 6-12 months and 2 years after the course. The vast majority of our participants (84%) teach others the skills they have learnt, thereby increasing the impact of our training programme and we have been able to facilitate new collaborations.

Joint training events and workshops have achieved a big impact of strengthening the community. The BioExcel/PRACE spring school for the first time brought together core developers of the most popular, open source Molecular Dynamic (MD) codes (GROMACS, AMBER, NAMD) and Visual Molecular Dynamics (VMD). The workshops during PASC18 (Basel, July 2018), Workflows Workshop (Barcelona, December 2018) and Sharing Data for Molecular Simulations (Stockholm, November 2018) were also instrumental in making close ties between European and US researchers, and follow-up events have been planned.

Training activities have been also identified as crucial for the long-term sustainability of the centre and included in the portfolio of services.