New digital research infrastructure organization announces first funding opportunity

Canada’s New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO) — created in 2019 to fix a system that has been described as “fragmented, oversubscribed and underfunded" — has announced its first funding program.

The new national not-for-profit organization will spend $20 million to "build national research capacity and deliver on NDRIO’s mandate to create a broad and integrated Canadian digital research infrastructure (DRI) ecosystem," according to its website.

"The goal of these programs is to build the blocks for national DRI," said Jennifer Robitaille, NDRIO’s Director of Procurement and Grant Management, in an interview with Research Money. "All of our activities behind the scenes have been feeding into this funding call and also our strategic plan. We’ve been consulting with the research community since we began… and we keep hearing that we need to build those blocks."

The Inaugural Funding Opportunity, or IFO, is an $18-million program open to researchers from all disciplines at educational institutions, hospitals and not-for-profit organizations across Canada. Proposals must satisfy at least two of five key objectives, which include facilitating interoperability, integration and access to DRI components, developing new or enhanced tools and platforms to facilitate the data discoverability, analysis and management, and enabling researchers who have not used Canada's DRI to migrate their workflows to existing infrastructure.

The IFO has two funding streams for projects from 12 to 18 months: one for projects between $100,000 and $1 million, and another for projects between $1 million and $3 million.

"Historically, the same institutions have been successful in getting DRI funding. We are striving very hard to make sure smaller institutions also have access, which is part of why we have those two funding streams in the inaugural call. We are also working hard to engage underrepresented communities such as Indigenous peoples," said Robitaille.

NDRIO is also launching a separate, $2-million Cloud Computing Pilot Project this fall, which is aimed at identifying opportunities for integrating cloud computing nationally.

"Individual institutions are currently using cloud computing, but it hasn't really taken hold at the national level. We're interested in learning how can we can integrate it into the research process or scale it up, because it would really enhance accessibility," said Robitaille.

Rethinking DRI

NDRIO is designed to harmonize and improve access to digital tools, services and infrastructure for Canadian researchers.

Until it was established in 2019, various organizations were responsible for the three pillars of DRI: advanced research computing, research software and research data management (see Table 1). The result was a fragmented system that was not keeping pace with the mounting needs of the Canadian research community or with our competitors globally.

*Portage joined NDRIO earlier this year.

To address this situation, several reports, including the Fundamental Science Review, called for a national DRI strategy and consolidation of DRI organizations. Finally, in 2018, Innovation, Science and Economic Development (ISED) earmarked $572.5 million over five years toward a national DRI strategy, including $375 million for the creation of a new national not-for-profit organization.

The two funding programs were created following extensive consultation with the research community, including a national needs assessment and surveys. The preliminary details of the IFO are now available on NDRIO’s website. A call for applications will be launched in September at the earliest.

At NDRIO’s annual general meeting on September 28, the organization will release its first Strategic Plan as well as a new brand and visual identity. NDRIO is expected to assume full responsibility for advanced research computing, research data management and research software in April 2022.

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