As a 7-year strategic framework this Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) outlines the overall direction, objectives and impacts without detailing specific deliverables or milestones that will follow in subsequent Grant Agreements (SGAs) that will be actioned under the FPA. In this FPA, the GÉANT consortium of European NRENs propose to evolve the European Communications Commons to provide secure, cost-effective, highly available and reliable services for very high-speed connectivity, identity inter-federation, mobility, security and trust services and solutions; increasing creativity and efficiency of research and ensuring the digital continuum of services to R&E users anywhere in the EU, bridging the divide between developed and less-developed regions. The connectivity and associated services provided are indispensable for seamless, unimpeded access to relevant data, as well as exploitation and management of data generated by European researchers in almost all large research infrastructures. Thanks to successful collaboration between the EC, the GÉANT consortium of NRENs, and their users, these services are second to none, and routinely surpass those of international counterparts. One of the most successful attributes of the GÉANT consortium representing the Research and Education Networks of 44 countries across Europe is the proven ability to agree common interests, while promoting individual or group-led innovations and sharing costs across a diversified membership. GÉANT works with a wide variety of European and global stakeholders to ensure future user requirements for infrastructure are met in a cost-effective and interoperable way. The expertise of hundreds of professionals in R&E networking and industry will be mobilised through the SGAs following this FPA. The GÉANT partners are confident that their joint experience and the leadership of the GÉANT Association will facilitate a successful and impactful execution of a series of SGAs under the proposed FPA.

GN4-2 is the proposed project for the second Specific Grant Agreement under the 68-month Framework Partnership Agreement (FPA) established between the GÉANT Consortium and the European Commission in April 2015.This second phase of implementing the FPA will raise European research to the next level by promoting scientific excellence, access and re-use of research data. It will also drive European-wide cost efficiencies in scientific infrastructure by promoting interoperability with other e-infrastructures on an unprecedented scale. The FPA objective for the GÉANT Partnership is to contribute to effective European research by making Europe the best-connected region in the world. GÉANT must offer European researchers the network, communications facilities and application access that ensure the digital continuum necessary to conduct world-class research in collaboration with their peers, regardless of geographical location. GÉANT will maintain the operational excellence of the established GÉANT services, while achieving economies on the costs of the backbone network. The reliable, secure and state-of-the-art network services offered to researchers and other network users across Europe will remain exceptional. Massive data-transfer capacities required by extreme-scale instruments and by the penetration of big data in many areas of science will be prototyped with due consideration to the specific security and deployment challenges. Trust and identity is also prioritised with the introduction of a scalable operational model and with user requirements addressed in close concertation with the AARC and proposed AARC2 projects. GN4-2 developments are also guided by the vision of a future where a set of coherent and integrated European e-infrastructure services will offer convenient, seamless access for end-users through a common service catalogue, and facilitating the adoption of services offered by new e-infrastructure developments, such as the European Open Science Cloud.

In the last decade, a number of initiatives were crucial for enabling high-quality research - by providing e-Infrastructure resources, application support and training - in both South East Europe (SEE) and Eastern Mediterranean (EM). They helped reduce the digital divide and brain drain in Europe, by ensuring access to regional e-Infrastructures to new member states, states on path to ascension, and states in European Neighborhood Policy area – in total 14 countries in SEE and 6 in EM. This VI-SEEM proposal brings together these e-Infrastructures to build capacity and better utilize synergies, for an improved service provision within a unified Virtual Research Environment (VRE) for the inter-disciplinary scientific user communities in the combined SEE and EM regions (SEEM). The overall objective is to provide user-friendly integrated e-Infrastructure platform for regional cross-border Scientific Communities in Climatology, Life Sciences, and Cultural Heritage for the SEEM region; by linking compute, data, and visualization resources, as well as services, models, software and tools. This VRE will provide the scientists and researchers with the support in full lifecycle of collaborative research: accessing and sharing relevant research data, using it with provided codes and tools to carry out new experiments and simulations on large-scale e-Infrastructures, and producing new knowledge and data - which can be stored and shared in the same VRE. Climatology and Life Science communities are directly relevant for Societal Challenges. The driving ambition of this proposal is to maintain leadership in enabling e-Infrastructure based research and innovation in the region for the 3 strategic regional user communities: supporting multidisciplinary solutions, advancing their research, and bridging the development gap with the rest of Europe. The VI-SEEM consortium brings together e-Infrastructure operators and Scientific Communities in a common endeavor.