Research project

Building evidence for research assessment reform: Pensoft joins the new Horizon Europe project REALISE

As part of the REALISE consortium, Pensoft contributes to the project with services and know-how in scholarly publishing and project branding

Pensoft is taking part in the newly launched EU-funded project REALISE (Responsible Evaluation and Assessment Leading to Inclusive Scholarly Excellence), as a leader of Work Package 2: Communication, Dissemination and Exploitation of project progress and results.

REALISE focuses on building evidence for research assessment reform to ultimately develop pathways across the European Research Area to more inclusive and reasonable practices.

The Project

REALISE is dedicated to leading the way in research assessment reform by delivering evidence-based insights and actionable guidance.

The project has outlined several objectives to reach its goals, including:

Creating a knowledge base of synthesised evidence: REALISE is to combine cutting-edge evidence and framework conditions for the practical application of valid and thorough research assessment reform.
Investigating novel assessment tools and methods: the consortium is to conduct research activities to explore a broader range of new tools and methods for research assessment.
Investigating novel reform methods: the project is to carry out research activities to analyse new approaches, based on both theory and methods, to reform, institutional changes and culture.
Reflect and recommend: the consortium is to combine project findings and co-create a coherent roadmap for future developments.
Exchange, engage and valorise: REALISE is to co-create studies to explore new research assessment tools and methods.

The goals are aligned with the European Commission’s vision and recommendation for an extensive set of innovations and metrics to modernise research assessment.

Pensoft’s role in REALISE

As the leader of Work Package 2, Pensoft will reinforce the project’s visibility and long-term impact. Key activities under this work package include:

Unique brand identity: Pensoft will create a distinctive and recognisable visual identity for the project, including a logo, brand manual, promotional materials and a website to serve as a hub for project updates and content.
Social media: To ensure community engagement and visibility, Pensoft will create and manage the project’s social media profiles, fostering an active and inclusive social media presence.
Communication, dissemination and exploitation plan: Pensoft will prepare a plan for sharing project updates and results with key audiences and stakeholders. The plan will be implemented in the early stages of the project.
Stakeholder mapping and engagement: Pensoft will contribute to the in-depth stakeholder analysis led by the coordinating institution.

The listed efforts, and more, aim to ensure that project results are widely accessible and reusable by all relevant and targeted groups within and beyond the research community.

International Consortium

REALISE brings together nine institutions across eight European countries operating in various sectors:

Know Center (KNOW), coordinator – Austria
The University of Leiden (ULEI) – Netherlands
Radboud University (SRU) – Netherlands
The University of Edinburgh (UEDIN) – United Kingdom
Spanish National Research Council (CSIC)/Ingenio (CSIC-UPV) – Spain
University of Coimbra (UCOIMBRA) – Portugal
Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV) – Finland
SWPS University (SWPS UNIVERSITY) – Poland
Pensoft Publishers(PENSOFT) – Bulgaria

Together, the consortium is dedicated to providing evidence for research assessment reforms and developing pathways to more inclusive and responsible practices in research assessment.

Over the next few months, REALISE will focus on providing an ambitious research agenda dedicated to creating a systematic evidence base for research assessment reform, leveraging strong existing links to key initiatives.

Visit the REALISE project’s website and follow the project on BlueSky and LinkedIn to stay connected and follow the project’s progress.

BiCIKL keeps on adding project outcomes in own collection in RIO Journal

The publications so far include the grant proposal; conference abstracts, a workshop report, guidelines papers and deliverables submitted to the Commission.

The dynamic open-science project collection of BiCIKL, titled “Towards interlinked FAIR biodiversity knowledge: The BiCIKL perspective” (doi: 10.3897/rio.coll.105), continues to grow, as the project progresses into its third year and its results accumulate ever so exponentially.

Following the publication of three important BiCIKL deliverables: the project’s Data Management Plan, its Visual identity package and a report, describing the newly built workﬂow and tools for data extraction, conversion and indexing and the user applications from OpenBiodiv, there are currently 30 research outcomes in the BiCIKL collection that have been shared publicly to the world, rather than merely submitted to the European Commission.

Shortly after the BiCIKL project started in 2021, a project-branded collection was launched in the open-science scholarly journal Research Ideas and Outcomes (RIO). There, the partners have been publishing – and thus preserving – conclusive research papers, as well as early and interim scientific outputs.

The publications so far also include the BiCIKL grant proposal, which earned the support of the European Commission in 2021; conference abstracts, submitted by the partners to two consecutive TDWG conferences; a project report that summarises recommendations on interoperability among infrastructures, as concluded from a hackathon organised by BiCIKL; and two Guidelines papers, aiming to trigger a culture change in the way data is shared, used and reused in the biodiversity field.

In fact, one of the Guidelines papers, where representatives of the Consortium of European Taxonomic Facilities (CETAF), the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections (SPNHC) and the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) came together to publish their joint statement on best practices for the citation of authorities of scientific names, has so far generated about 4,000 views by nearly 3,000 unique readers.

At the time of writing, the top three of the most read papers in the BiCIKL collection is completed by the grant proposal and the second Guidelines paper, where the partners – based on their extensive and versatile experience – present recommendations about the use of annotations and persistent identifiers in taxonomy and biodiversity publishing.

Access to data and services along the entire data and research life cycle in biodiversity science.
The figure was featured in the BiCIKL grant proposal, now made available from the BiCIKL project collection in *RIO Journal*.

What one might find quite odd when browsing the BiCIKL collection is that each publication is marked with its own publication source, even though all contributions are clearly already accessible from RIO Journal.

So, we can see many project outputs marked as RIO publications, but also others that have been published in the likes of F1000Research, the official journal of TDWG: Biodiversity Information Science and Standards, and even preprints servers, such as BiohackrXiv.

This is because one of the unique features of RIO allows for consortia to use their project collection as a one-stop access point for all scientific results, regardless of their publication venue, by means of linking to the original source via metadata. Additionally, projects may also upload their documents in their original format and layout, thanks to the integration between RIO and ARPHA Preprints. This is in fact how BiCIKL chose to share their latest deliverables using the very same files they submitted to the Commission.

“In line with the mission of BiCIKL and our consortium’s dedication to FAIRness in science, we wanted to keep our project’s progress and results fully transparent and easily accessible and reusable to anyone, anywhere,”

explains Prof Lyubomir Penev, BiCIKL’s Project Coordinator and founder and CEO of Pensoft.

“This is why we opted to collate the outcomes of BiCIKL in one place – starting from the grant proposal itself, and then progressively adding workshop reports, recommendations, research papers and what not. By the time BiCIKL concludes, not only will we be ready to refer back to any step along the way that we have just walked together, but also rest assured that what we have achieved and learnt remains at the fingertips of those we have done it for and those who come after them,” he adds.

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You can keep tabs on the BiCIKL project collection in RIO Journal by subscribing to the journal newsletter or following @RIOJournal on Twitter and Facebook.

Towards a climate-neutral society: Pensoft takes part in the Horizon project ForestPaths

Apart from science communication, Pensoft is also tasked with the development and maintenance of the CANOPY platform, whose aim is to support policymakers and national and regional authorities

Dedicated to bridging the gap between science, policy, industry and society, Pensoft is striving to maximise ForestPaths’ impact in meeting Europe’s climate and biodiversity targets

The backdrop

The European Union (EU) has set ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% in 2030 and to become climate neutral by 2050, which require urgent and major societal and economic reforms.

In the meantime, the EU also aims to protect biodiversity and reverse the degradation of ecosystems, while using natural resources to mitigate climate change.

ForestPaths – a recently started Horizon Europe project will help meet Europe’s climate and biodiversity targets by providing clear policy options that enable European forests and the forest-based sector to contribute to climate change mitigation, while conserving their biodiversity and sustaining the services they provide to people.

As an experienced science communicator, Pensoft is dedicated to maximising ForestPaths’ impact. The team will do so by means of tailored communication, dissemination and exploitation strategies aimed at sharing the project’s results with relevant stakeholder groups.

Furthermore, Pensoft is tasked with the development and long-term maintenance of the CANOPY platform, whose aim is to support policymakers and national and regional authorities by granting them access to the knowledge and scientific evidence acquired within ForestPaths long after the project is finalised.

The ForestPaths approach

ForestPaths will work with practitioners through four demo cases to determine climate- and biodiversity-smart forest management options.

Building on these options, the project will collaborate with policymakers and key authorities through a series of Policy labs, where the partners will co-design policy pathways, which will then be analysed with next-generation integrated assessment techniques.

Lastly, ForestPaths will apply this framework for an all-round assessment of the climate mitigation potential of European forests and the forest-based sector.

The ForestPaths legacy

ForestPaths’ policy pathways – as well as their supporting information and evidence – will be made openly available through the project’s policy-support platform CANOPY, hosted on the ForestPaths website.

The platform, whose launch is scheduled for 2026, will feature an interactive policy analysis tool explaining the policy pathways and showcasing their implications, as well as providing detailed assessment results and policy recommendations in an easily accessible manner. Its long-term mission is to become the go-to place for easily accessible assessment results and policy recommendations.

“We are excited to be doing our part for Europe’s fight for climate neutrality by extending ForestPaths reach to policy, industry and society at large! As an open-access scientific publisher engaged in about 50 environmental research projects, Pensoft echoes ForestPaths’ aim to support the EU’s climate neutrality transition through what we are sure will be a prolific international research collaboration,” says ForestPaths’ WP7 leader Anna Sapundzhieva.

You can find out more about the project on the ForestPath website: forestpaths.eu. Stay up to date with the project’s progress on Twitter (@forestpaths_eu) and LinkedIn (/forestpaths-project).

Tag: Research project