The FREYA project


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FREYA was a 3-year project funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 programme. The project started in december 2017 and ended in december 2020. It aimed to extend the infrastructure for persistent identifiers (PIDs) as a core component of open research, in the EU and globally. FREYA worked to improve discovery, navigation, retrieval, and access to research resources. New provenance services were developed to enable researchers to better evaluate data and make the scientific record more complete, reliable, and traceable. By engaging with the global community through the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and other research infrastructures, we worked together to realise the vision of fully accessible data.

 

The three pillars of FREYA

The PID Graph connects and integrates PID systems, creating relationships across a network of PIDs and serving as a basis for new services

The PID Forum promotes engagement with the global community via pidforum.org, and through organising conferences, workshops and other PID-themed events

The PID Commons addresses the sustainability of the PID infrastructure resulting from FREYA beyond the lifetime of the project

 

Project goals

  • Improving data discovery by extending and cross-linking PID core services, building on existing PID services infrastructure provided by Crossref, DataCite, ORCID and identifiers.org
  • Extending the potential of PIDs by designing, developing and delivering innovative services for data discovery, resource identification and provenance tracking
  • Integrating the PID Graph in disciplinary contexts and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) via disciplinary demonstrator systems
  • Building and promoting a community of practice via establishing the PID Forum, acting in tandem with the RDA
  • Sustaining an open and trusted PID e-infrastructure provision for the benefit of the research community within the EU and globally

 

FREYA and the EOSC

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will bring Open Science to Europe’s researchers through open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data. FREYA worked to support the EOSC by developing a PID infrastructure that facilitates and boosts this ecosystem. Furthermore, FREYA's demonstrator systems was complementary to the EOSC Pilot project, showing the value of the Open Science vision and guiding the further development of the EOSC. FREYA  collaborated extensively with the EOSC-projects OpenAIRE Advance and EOSC-hub.

 

Why ‘FREYA’?

The FREYA project followed on from two previous EU-funded projects, the ORCID and DataCite Interoperabiltiy Network (ODIN), and Technical and Human Infrastructure for Open Research (THOR). FREYA is not an acronym, but as we continued to expand on the infrastructure and communities built during those projects, it was chosen with reference to the Norse origin of our earlier project names.