e-ROSA D3.7 - Foresight Roadmap Paper

This roadmap is one of the outputs of the e-ROSA project “e-infrastructure Roadmap for Open Science in Agriculture” funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement No 730988. The consortium gathers two research performing organizations INRA (FR) and WUR (NL) and Agroknow (GR) a private company. More than 100 stakeholders were involved in the elaboration of this roadmap through the workshops and the project methodology to build a common knowledge, foresight and recommendations to achieve this vision.

The process all along the project was “as open as possible” with workshops, open consultations to discuss, enrich and assess the proposals. The methodology allowed to:

- Understand the actual landscape using i) a bibliometric study to identify the academic actors working on “Data AND Agriculture” ii) a bibliographic analysis of e-infrastructure roadmaps as reference for our future work iii) the identification and mapping of different entities (organization, initiatives, facilities, data points etc.) to describe the data ecosystem.
- Analyse the scientific challenges and researchers needs, working on use cases in different domains: smart farming, omics/phenotyping, food and nutrition, with interviews and workshop
- Describe a vision for open science in Agri-food and explain how an e-infrastructure could support this vision. The writing of this statement was planned from the beginning as a collaborative effort, not limited to the participants of the e-ROSA project. 17 professionals from 3 continents (USA, India, China, Europe) and important organizations (CGIAR, CAAS, ICAR, Bayer, INRA, CABI) participated in the online discussion and editing process.
- Elaborate recommendations to achieve the vision addressing different issues, not only technical but also on human and economic aspects: culture change, skills and sustainability of the envisioned e-infrastructure.

Thus, this document is organized in 5 main sections:

• The vision “Open science and Food systems in 2030” as a driver of transformation
• The challenges and the researchers’ needs to address
• The analysis of the actual “data ecosystem”
• The requirements for an e-infrastructure and its envisioned architecture
• The recommendations for the implementation

We have used the “Share, connect, collaborate” motto as guide trough this story as it appears to be the most federative challenges to build an e-infrastructure federating the actual scattered data ecosystem in the agri-food sciences:

• Sharing: of the resources of relevance to the scientific process (data, models, papers, etc). Open science is only possible if one is able to share one’s research first.
• Connecting: available resources need to be connected to allow integration and tackling large scale and more ambitious questions in science.
• Collaborating: the research community itself needs to collaborate beyond ad-hoc arrangements to create, maintain and supply domain specific resources for open science in a network of regional or domain nodes.
This version will be updated, the readers should refer to the web site http://erosa.aginfra.eu to be informed of the latest developments.