DoSSIER (Domain Specific Systems for Information Extraction and Retrieval) will elucidate, model, and address the different information needs of professional users. It mobilizes an excellent and highly synergistic team of world-leading Information Retrieval (IR) experts from 5 EU States who, together with 3 academic partners (universities in US, Japan, and Australia), and 11 industrial partners (dynamic SMEs and large corporations) will produce fundamental insights into how users comprehend, formulate, and access information in professional environments. For this, DoSSIER takes a highly innovative intersectorial and multidisciplinary approach, addresses fundamental questions about the nature and representation of information needs, engages in novel qualitative and quantitative evaluation, and provides training towards a structured, rigorous, and practical approach to search systems. It connects premier universities and outstanding industrial partners to provide unique opportunities to young researchers. The research is structured in three areas: 1. fundamental models of users and domain specificity, 2. contextual and personalized search, and 3. workflow, task and the interface. Each area individually and in cross-field fertilisation, will produce breakthroughs in our understanding of computer-supported human information search workflows. The result will be a new generation of information access systems, which will accelerate innovation cycles in EU academia and industry, as well as in society as a whole. To be both concrete and generic, DoSSIER consists of 8 projects identifying a target domain and 7 projects acting horizontally across domains. Three vital domains are used: science & technology innovation, law, and healthcare. Questions currently unanswerable (e.g. What is the key innovation difference between these two patents?) will be answerable either directly by a system, or by the development of cognition-enhancing instruments for interacting with information.