Services
Transnational Access to Infrastructure
POLARIN partners operate world-class research infrastructure in the Arctic and Antarctic, which result from a long history of polar research and significant investments made by national polar programmes. For the first time ever, POLARIN will provide Transnational Access to a set of complementary and multidisciplinary European and International research infrastructure covering both poles.
Access to these will be granted as transnational access either in person or remote. Challenge-driven access calls will be launched to allow access provision to integrated and customised infrastructure and services. Multi-platform access to different kinds of infrastructures will ensure that multidisciplinary research projects can integrate results from multiple realms.
Call will be open to access:
– 27 Arctic stations,
– 11 Antarctic stations
– 12 Research vessels including icebreakers
– 1 deep-sea observatory, 2 observational networks and 15 key observatories associated to research stations
– 4 Ice and sediment core repositories
Virtual Access
In the context of POLARIN, Virtual Access (VA) refers to the provision of user-friendly, free of charge, and open online access to services provided by polar research infrastructures including scientific data, metadata, and data services.
VA is openly available to all users without a selection process and enables researchers, policymakers, and stakeholders by providing evidence-based information for sustainable management of polar environments, particularly in the context of climate change and human activity impacts.
POLARIN supports VA by connecting data, metadata, data services, and data products from multiple polar research infrastructures through the POLARIN metadata catalogue. This includes the technical and operational work required to host, curate, maintain, and deliver distributed VA resources via a common access point (the POLARIN metadata catalogue), and to ensure that these resources remain discoverable, interoperable, reliable, and usable throughout the project lifetime. VA funding may therefore be used to support efforts to integrate new or previously unpublished datasets with the POLARIN metadata catalogue and the operational costs of the VA data repositories to ensure effective and sustained delivery of these services to users throughout the project lifetime.
Datasets and services provided through VA are integrated into the POLARIN metadata catalogue and exposed through the POLARIN Data Hub, ensuring discoverability, accessibility, and reusability in line with FAIR principles, and enabling the monitoring of access in accordance with Horizon Europe requirements.
Training
POLARIN will develop training programmes to ensure that early career researchers, professionals and research infrastructure (RI) users are able to fully exploit the services that the RIs are offering. It will implement a series of online seminars and other training resources to teach current and futures users of RIs on how to plan their field work campaigns/cruises, to optimally use the scientific equipment and to act in a sustainable way.
A dedicated training programme on data management and data processing (data stewardship) will complement this training. In addition, POLARIN will implement a safety training under polar conditions compliant with the Polar Code, to ensure that PIs of polar expeditions are able to deal with emergency situations.
POLARIN Data Hub - Data Access and services
POLARIN will provide improved access to polar data by harmonising data management standards and workflows covering the complete life cycle of data from acquisition to long-term archiving. POLARIN will concentrate on reducing the fragmentation of data landscape and in improving the consumption of data.
Access to metadata, data and data services will be offered user-friendly and free of charge to users, through a single-entry portal. Such a centralized Data Hub will be implemented to provide advanced functionalities and tools for data exploration and integration.