Rules

REQUIREMENTS TO BE FULFILLED

To access to the LEXIS platform, Open Call Applicants will have to sign rules governing this access and will also have to comply with these rules.

These rules govern in particular the possibilities of using:

The computing capacity of the infrastructure,
The use of software,
The conditions of access to the infrastructure.

For simplicity of using existing set of rules, partners will have to sign the rules of those supercomputing centres, where they will perform their calculations.

RULES FOR APPLICATION EXPERIMENT SUBMISSION

SUBMISSION LANGUAGE

The application and the related documents have to be written in English (US English, UK English, International English). Any document or application submitted in any other language will be rejected.

SUBMISSION PROCESS & TIMING

The applicants can submit their application experiments from the date the submission forms are made available on the LEXIS Website. Submissions can be accepted from this date to summer 2021 (August at latest).

Submissions will follow a 2 steps selection process.

STEP 1: once the application completed accordingly is received by the LEXIS Open Call Board, the selection committee will operate a first PRE-SELECTION uniquely based on the application received. Applicants not pre-selected will receive a notification by email. The Pre-selected Applicants will be notified for moving to Step 2 of the selection process

STEP 2: Each pre-selected applicant will be invited to a meeting (which modalities will depend on the circumstances, mainly due to the COVID 19 situation) with the selection committee to discuss in depth the Application Experiment submitted and the applicant’s project

In the case the meeting with an applicant is not sufficient to take a final decision, the selection committee may decide to request more information and/or to organise a second meeting with the applicant.

In the following days after the end of the meetings with pre-selected applicants, the selection committee will communicate to Applicants the final decision (positive or negative).

Pre-selection and final selection will end when the resources made available by the LEXIS Consortium are used in full or if the selection committee decides that the number and quality of selected applicants is such that the Open Call can be closed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF RECEIPT

Applicants will receive a formal acknowledgment of reception by email. This acknowledgment will not be in any way a validation or acceptance of the Application

RE-OPENING OF THE CALL

In the case that the evaluation process concludes with insufficient number of accepted or validated proposals, the LEXIS Consortium reserves the right to re-open the Call.

EVALUATION AND SELECTION

Essential to the whole process of selecting the Application Experiments and to proceed to the continuous evaluation and monitoring of results, outcomes and feedbacks, an Open Call Board has been set up by the LEXIS Consortium.

Prior to your submission you can download the self-administered questionnaire that you would have to complete and upload during the submission process. Download the questionnaire.

GENERAL RULES

The Open Call Board will receive all submissions and will proceed to evaluate each of them.
It will be its sovereign decision to select application experiments the most suitable for the purpose of this Open Call, in the limits of the capacities made available for this Open Call.
The Open Call Board may have to request complementary information about the submitted application experiments before taking a final decision.

DURATION OF USAGE OF THE LEXIS PLATFORM

The experimental activities of the Open Call pilots will end 2 months before the end of the LEXIS project, while Exploitation, Communication and Dissemination activities related to these Application Experiments have to be managed as long as the project is running. Special regulations referring to Computing and Storage resources are reported below.

Special usage-duration limits applying to computing resources: computations of an open-call pilot will end when the limit of core-hours allocated to that pilot is achieved (cf. Section 3.2.1).
Special usage-duration limits applying to storage resources: preservation of data, if not guaranteed otherwise (e.g. by direct communication with a computing centre in LEXIS), will only be guaranteed until the end of the LEXIS project. In emergency cases and for limited amounts of data (<10TB), longer preservation may be agreed on a case by case basis.

FINAL EVALUATION OF OPEN CALL PROJECTS

The Project Managers in collaboration with the LEXIS Management and the Open Call Board will monitor a continuous evaluation process all along the Open Call duration.

Ultimately, at the end of each application experiment, the Open Call Board will have a fully documented evaluation report made by the Project Managers.

Each Application Experiments will have an “End of Project” evaluation made and discussed with the Applicants.

Each individual End-of-Project Report will be then communicated to the LEXIS management team and the Open Call Board for final evaluation.

The detailed and global evaluations of the Open Call will be produced in 2 versions, to respect the confidentiality rules and the IP management rules:

1 version (confidential) for internal usage (EU, LEXIS Consortium, Open Call Board, Applicants when relevant),
1 version (public) for external communication purposes (when relevant).

COLLECTION OF FEEDBACK FOR EACH APPLICATION EXPERIMENT & QUALITY MANAGEMENT

All along the duration of the Open Call, each selected project will be monitored by the Project Managers in coordination with the Open Call Board with a process for collecting qualitative and quantitative data for assessing:

User experience in using the LEXIS platform (Portal, Infrastructure, Data management, Visualisation, etc.),
Effectiveness of infrastructure management,
Effectiveness of orchestration,
Effectiveness of Data management, Data Nodes, Cross site synchronisation for distributed storage,
Security both from External User and LEXIS Platform administration perspectives.

This collection of data, qualitative and quantitative, will help the LEXIS Consortium to assess quality issues and to address them as soon as possible in preparation of the final delivery of the LEXIS Project.

COMMUNICATION & DISSEMINATION – PUBLICATION OF RESULTS

The Open Call must generate a significant amount of various type of Communication and Dissemination actions.

It is a major tool to significantly increase awareness about the LEXIS Project and platform to attract interest of both the Research and the Industry communities.

The ultimate goal of the LEXIS platform is to provide these communities with an efficient way to face the challenges from modern digitalisation and computing era in a complex and converged environment (HPC, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Cloud based infrastructures and/or accesses, etc.). As a consequence, it is strategic to use the opportunities generated by using Real Use Cases and Application Experiments on the LEXIS platform Open Call to demonstrate the effectiveness, the relevance and the efficiency for the benefits of our research and modern economies in the EU.

These actions will be organised around 3 major phases:

Phase 1: Launching the Open Call (awareness, recruiting applicants, Exploitation advertisement and Teasing)
Phase 2: Along the duration of the Open Call (News, results sharing, monitoring, networks animation, teasing for Exploitation)
Phase 3: End of the Open Call (results, outcomes, teasing for Exploitation)

For each of the above mentioned phases, we will act in 2 categories of actions, using the tools and strategies developed by the LEXIS Consortium:

Dissemination,
Communication.

The global perspective of the Open Call itself and the Dissemination and Communication efforts developed around it is to significantly prepare and support the Exploitation plan for the LEXIS Project, itself focusing on 2 phases of Exploitation:

During the LEXIS project,
After the end of the LEXIS project.

In doing so, we will significantly increase the reach and the impact of LEXIS by capitalising on and leveraging:

The efforts structured and deployed by the LEXIS Consortium for the LEXIS Project itself, and for its own benefit during and after the end of the project,
The individual partners of the LEXIS Consortium by allowing them to use the communication, dissemination tools and outcomes for their own network in their respective industry and research communities, to their own benefits,
The possibility for Applicants to largely communicate on the success of using the LEXIS platform for their projects.

The LEXIS Consortium will action every tool, channel build, developed and monitored for and on behalf of the LEXIS project, including among them:

Scientific and other Publications,
Conferences, Workshops, Trainings, Events and Tradeshows,
Website, Newsletters, Blogs and SEO best practices,
Marketing materials,
Social Networks (from the LEXIS Project itself and from Consortium Members),
Field actions by the operational teams of each partner in the LEXIS project (Sales, Marketing, Communication),

Corporate, EU and National bodies relays when possible.

LEGAL, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY & CONFIDENTIALITY

OPEN CALL – IPR MANAGEMENT

IPR management applied in the Open Call will follow the rules described in the LEXIS project proposal as well as in the Grant Agreement signed by all members of LEXIS project. General IPR principle of LEXIS project is to ensure as much as possible that the project work is open and usable by others.

This approach will be applied for Open Call as well. However, due to commercial considerations of some industrial partners, not all the work carried out during the Open Call will be open. All the activities regarding IPR issues in the Open Call will be coordinated by the Innovation Manager of the LEXIS project.

Before the Open Call project launches, the LEXIS Project partners will define rules governing access to the LEXIS platform in order to minimize any internal issues within the consortium related to the work, IP ownership, Confidential Information, Access Rights to Background and Foreground IP for the duration of the Open Call.

The Open Call Applicants can identify and agree (in writing) on the background IP for the action. ‘Background’ means any data, know-how or information — whatever its form or nature (tangible or intangible), including any rights such as intellectual property rights that the Open Call Applicant would be using during the Open Call.

Some of the Results as well as data sets, for example workflows, reports, generated during the Open Call will be made publicly available as an Open Source.