Category: Projects

Funded in 2026 – SILT Core is a specification-focused project addressing a recognised gap in federated identity systems: the absence of portable, inspectable delegation and revocation semantics. The project defines a minimal, technology-agnostic layer for expressing authority, scope, and consent in a way that can be validated independently of application platforms. Through an initial proof-of-concept, SILT Core will deliver an open specification, machine-readable schemas, and a lightweight validator, contributing to more transparent and accountable governance across research and education infrastructure.

Funded in 2026 – The project will develop, test, and roll out an in-built text editor for the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform from PKP, enabling journals to streamline production directly in OJS and strengthen the Open Access publishing infrastructure.

The project addresses a critical gap in the scholarly communication infrastructure: the absence of an integrated, standards-compliant editor within Open Journal Systems (OJS). Today, journal editors must rely on fragmented, external tools to produce final publication formats, resulting in inefficiencies, higher costs, and inconsistent quality. These are challenges that particularly burden small, volunteer-driven Diamond Open Access journals. By embedding the SciFlow Open Source text editor directly into OJS, the Project provides a sustainable, open, and interoperable solution that strengthens the open-access ecosystem.

To this end, the Göttingen State and University Library is working closely with the provider SciFlow.

Funded in 2026 – The project aims to expand the DSpace-CRIS data model so that instruments and facilities can be added to the snapshot for the institutional research activity. DSpace-CRIS is an increasingly popular open-source alternative to implement an institutional research information management system (RIMS/CRIS). With 54 instances from 21 different countries on the euroCRIS Directory of Research Information Systems (DRIS) at the time of writing, DSpace-CRIS is by far the most popular open-source software solution in the directory. This is because its expanded data model allows the main research entities (such as researchers, organisations, projects, publications, datasets, etc) to be effectively collected and cross-linked.

The INST-DSpace project plan includes the modelling of this new research entity in CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) by euroCRIS on the basis of the work done by the RDA PIDINST WG, its implementation in the DSpace-CRIS version under development by 4Science and its real-life testing by the Technical University of Hamburg via their DSpace-CRIS-based institutional CRIS TORE.

The recent announcement for the merger between DSpace and DSpace-CRIS means that this functionality will eventually become available to any institution currently operating a DSpace-based institutional repository.

By allowing institutions using DSpace-CRIS to showcase their research equipment and facilities, this development will deepen the implementation of Open Science in line with the Barcelona Declaration for Open Research Information.

Funded in 2025 – The project will provide an open-source NixOS-based gateway to help universities and research institutions in making their laboratories accessible on the Internet and in publishing them online. The gateway will package the full DecentraLabs remote access stack into a declarative, reproducible environment. DecentraLabs is building a decentralized ecosystem that enables universities and research centers to share and access online laboratories securely and transparently. The project combines blockchain protocols, online-lab software and higher-education infrastructure to allow laboratories to be published as digital assets, booked as time-bound services, and remunerated without a central gatekeeper. With support from the Vietsch Foundation, DecentraLabs will simplify provider onboarding by delivering reproducible deployments using NixOS and Docker that will be ready to accept eduGAIN connections. This ensures that a lab gateway can be set up in minutes, lowering the barrier for institutions worldwide to contribute their resources and join a sustainable, interoperable network where students, teachers and researchers can access laboratories directly with their institutional accounts.

Funded in 2025 – Email dates back over fifty years, but it is still one of the most widely used internet technologies. It is used for many official types of communication, but also for example for mission critical functions like resetting passwords and sending invoices. Metadata about email (who communicates when, with whom) is a strategic target.

Universities have massively shifted their email infrastructure to third party email providers, and thus share a lot of information about their students and staff involuntarily with these tech giants. With the increasing pressure of politics on academic freedom, and in the light of the current geopolitical situation as well as the known surveillance capabilities these providers are legally subject to, universities around the globe are starting to understand that such a dependency is unwise. This likely over time will mean a return to running ones own infrastructure as an academic community.

For that to work, the right technical setup needs to be in place. There is good software available to run servers to send, receive, store and distribute email – with protocols such as SMTP and IMAP. However, on top of that well-known stack meanwhile another layer of infrastucture has emerged to combat spam, phishing and spoofing of email. This is done with newish standards like SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

What is currently lacking in order for academia to run this infrastructure themselves is reliable free and open source software to properly manage the resulting information flows. This is the topic of DMARCaroni: a set of tools for processing DMARC reports and turning the wealth of information into actionable overviews and reports. DMARCaroni is written in Haskell, Rust and Elm. Within the scope of this project, the team will focus on a number of missing reporting capabilities (in particular to better understand spoofing attacks), improved data acquisition and deployment methods, and increasing accessibility.

Funded in 2024 – The project of Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) intends to add eduGAIN as a federated authentication  option and thus as a  login possibility to InvenioRDM,  the turn  key research data management  repository at  TU Graz.

InvenioRDM has been started by CERN and is being further developed by CERN and many partners around the world. It is an open source repository software written in Python and Javascript. It offers a variety of functions, such as the ability to assign a permanent identifier (DOI), the use of controlled vocabularies to describe objects, communities to group records together, login options like `Login with Github` and many more.

The project brings together functionality, configuration and customisation options in the python package invenio-eduGAIN.

Funded in 2024 – This project by Bristol Braille Technology CIC intends to better open up publicly accessible APIs to blind developers and academics by creating a universal language of spacial, tactile interfaces that run on novel electromechanical displays as well as being embossed to paper.

Just as common land that is only reached by jumping a stile is inaccessible by wheelchair, so sighted assumptions in public APIs makes much of the Internet commons inaccessible for blind developers and academics. This project will use a grid of electromechanical cells to present multidimensional data — tabular, vectors, graphs — as refreshing patterns of physical dot. Bristol Braille Technology and their partners in the Bristol University Computer Science Department will develop abstractions for tactile imagery as a reusable library of functions.

The aim is to greatly increase the inclusion of blind developers and academics in the future of a commonly owned Internet by working with tabular and spacial data sets, representing that data in a way that makes sense in tactile form in the same way they they are expected to make sense in a visual way. The output will be available publicly for use on Bristol Braille Technology’s own Canute hardware, on future full page tactile displays, and in paper form via the thousands of existing Braille embossers.

Funded in 2024 – The University of Cambridge is partnering with 4Science to deliver this project, which will integrate two key systems within the global scholarly ecosystem, the DSpace repository (https://www.dspace.org/) and OpenAlex (https://openalex.org/), a free and open catalogue of the world’s scholarly research system.

Using OpenAlex’s open API (Application Programming Interface), this integration will allow for the quick import of relevant research and scholarly (meta)data into DSpace repositories, helping institutions to improve the quality and completeness of their records of research outputs and streamlining researcher publication and reporting workflows by providing accurate and relevant information in automated ways. This integration will also save time for researchers and librarians, who would be able to dedicate time to more research-oriented tasks.

Reusing the data in OpenAlex would help institutions to improve the quality and completeness of data in institutional repositories and strengthen the wider open access network by increasing the number of versions and access points to content. Moreover, the availability of multiple (open access) copies of the materials can provide a more effective strategy for long-term preservation.

Funded in 2024 –

The project is an interactive online environment using a virtual set to to simulate audiovisual learning and creation processes. The environment consists of a virtual TV studio with three sets, to interactively manage lighting and filming schemes, based on the following functionality/usability scenario: five users with Quest 3 virtual reality glasses take on the roles of cinematographer, director, and three camera operators. Each user occupies the space through an avatar that allows them to move through the space and to modify the position and configuration of different light sources, as well as the cameras. In the latter case, control parameters related to the basic principles of photography are integrated, interacting consistently from a technical standpoint with the space and the arranged light sources. Additionally, these users can communicate with each other through the virtual space.

Funded in 2022 –

A grant to support “Advanced Deep Learning-based Analysis of Network Traffic Generated by Communication-and-Collaboration Apps used in COVID-19 pandemic” (ADDITIONAL) was awarded in 2022 to the CINI  research unit at the University of Napoli Federico II, Italy. The project page is available at https://traffic.comics.unina.it/ADDITIONAL/.

The project aims at applying advanced Deep Learning methods to support two critical tasks in managing modern networks: 1) traffic classification (i.e., associating observed traffic with the application that generated it) and 2) fine-grained prediction (i.e., forecasting traffic behavior, knowing the kind of application generating it).”

The COVID-19 pandemic increased the usage of communication-and-collaboration apps (Discord, GotoMeeting, Meet, Messenger, Skype, Slack, Teams, Webex, and Zoom) by mobile users. This sudden shift in Internet traffic poses a challenge to efficient network management and calls for enhanced network analytics tools able to overcome traditional monitoring techniques requiring time-consuming human experts’ intervention to adapt to the new conditions. Accordingly, ADDITIONAL aims at designing, implementing, and evaluating innovative tools based on Artificial Intelligence methodologies, with particular reference to Deep Learning architectures, to support network traffic classification and prediction. Given the heterogeneous and large-scale landscape of mobile apps, the focus is on gathering fine-grained network visibility. The proposal matches the interests of the scientific community, being beneficial to network providers, customers, and researchers.

The ADDITIONAL project duration is five months. Works include (i) the collection and annotation of the dataset, then (ii) a systematic study of the classification and prediction performance of state-of-the-art approaches, and finally (iii) the research and experimental validation of novel and improved classification and prediction approaches.

The ADDITIONAL proposal was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme

 

 

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to fund the MARLIN project, to support “Reliable user identification to grant access to local resources as well as secure remote access to scientific content”. The project was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme.

Universities, research institutes and schools offer researchers and students a variety of local resources (class rooms, multimedia rooms, meeting rooms, libraries, etc.), specific equipment, and services, such print and scan. 

Eduroam provides end users with access to the Wi-Fi local networks, but doesn’t provide access to restricted locations, such as a multimedia room, for example. Moreover, this doesn’t allow users to access local resources, such a simple printing services, of a remote institution they happen to be hosted at.

The project promises to develop a novel way to access local resources using secure authentication and authorization mechanisms, together with the ability to acknowledge the user’s identity, using biometric data though smart devices, which most of the users carry in their pockets on a daily basis. 

The project runs for one year and will result in a prototype with the following features: 

1. Secure access to content (university intranet portal) with ability to author document with verified user’s identity
2. Access institution local resources 

• • Using a printer in a 3^rd party institution where the user is temporary located 
  • Access a restricted room (laboratory) in a 3^rd party institution where the user is temporary located 

The prototype is going to be tested and implemented at the Laboratory of Telematics of the Bulgaria Academy of Science (LT-BAS ). 

 

 

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation and the GÉANT Association have started a project to support URAN, the research and education network of Ukraine and a member of GÉANT.

As the war in Ukraine goes on URAN will need our support and help more than ever, not just to survive but to stay as safe as possible and where possible to maintain and rebuild.

GÉANT and Europe’s NRENs will donate funds to primarily address URAN’s cash flow challenges and help to ensure URAN’s survival as an NREN. Whilst the war has heavily affected URAN’s many users who are currently unable to operate themselves and are therefore unable to pay for URAN services, URAN faces ongoing operational costs and is therefore at severe risk itself.

The funds donated to the Vietsch Foundation will be reserved only for the purpose of this project. The reservation is bound to the proposals as formulated by URAN and GÉANT in the pursuit of the objectives stated in the project agreement, and thus help to preserve the knowledge and skills of the Ukrainian NREN.

Funded in 2022 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to fund the project eduDNS, a Dynamic DNS service for Academia, eduDNS was relayed to the Vietsch Foundation by GÉANT through its Innovation Programme.

Nowadays, more and more services are dynamically deployed in Cloud environments. Usually, the services hosted on virtual machines in Cloud are accessible only via IP addresses or pre-configured hostnames given by the target Cloud providers, making it difficult to provide them with meaningful domain names. Dynamic DNS services exist to alleviate this problem, but none of them is scoped to the Academic realm.

The eduDNS project will provide a universal, vendor-independent Dynamic DNS support for research and education users. Service owners will log in the eduDNS portal via eduTEAMS, register meaningful, memorable hostnames (e.g. service-portal.vo.edudns.eu), assign the hostnames to their servers then provide access to their services via the hostnames.

eduDNS will simplify the deployment of services that are dynamically deployed in Cloud infrastructures. It removes the obstacles of changing IP addresses of services in Cloud at every deployment and enables obtaining SSL certificates for the hostnames. Service providers can migrate services from local servers to Cloud or from a Cloud site to another without noticing users from the change.

The project started at the beginning of 2022 and will end in Summer 2022 with a prototype of eduDNS service deployed at IISAS (Institute of Informatics, Slovak Academy of Sciences) and IFCA (Instituto de Física de Cantabria).

Funded in 2021 – The Vietsch Foundation announces a new project grant on Academic Achievement and Learning Diaries (AALD).

Epistemic cognition, like the justification of knowledge, is a growing theme in learning analytics. It is highly topical in the era of MOOCs and conflicting resources of knowledge.

AALD aims to increase the scientific understanding of students’ epistemic thinking related to learning analytics applications. This information is vital for making advancements in designing new applications to measure and monitor student success.

The application used to record student experience is a structured learning diary that allows higher education students to prepare for classes, make notes, and reflect on their learning experience afterward. Our research expands the dataset to include student interviews, student register data, and questionnaires (pre-test, post-test, and two delayed post-test questionnaires).

AALD contributes to publishing two scientific open access articles, a public web page describing the structured diary tool contents, and main findings summary of the project. In addition, a public presentation will be given as part of a relevant conference. The project timeline is from Oct 2021 to Jan 2022. Publications’ should be open after the review processes later in 2022.

For more information: Ville Kivimäki, University of Helsinki, ville.kivimaki@helsinki.fi

 

 

Funded in 2020 – The Vietsch Foundation funded the publication of “Targeted Online”, a handbok by the European Digital Rights (EDRi), an association of civil and human rights organisations from across Europe.

The web has become a place where visiting a webpage triggers many effects elsewhere, where advertising technology results in a surveillance ecosystem. Yet people still think of the ‘friendly’ world wide web of the nineties. The “Targeted Onlie” handbook is intended for curious internet users who want to understand the internet’s dominant business model, how tech companies use (and abuse) data, why some ads are eerily creepy and others so foolishly wrong. The handbook explains how online advertising works, and why a reform of the entire online advertising industry is urgently needed.

The “Targeted Online” handbook can be dowloaded here. For more informtion visit the EDRI website.

The Vietsch Foundation announces a new grant to CSC for a project to expand the EMREX network to the EU and beyond.

EMREX is a solution for transferring student data internationally in a machine-readable way. It consists of two parts: the technical solution and the international network (EMREX user group – EUG) enabling and developing the activities. EMREX originated as an EU-funded project 2015-2017, aiming to simplify and increase the quality of the credit transfer process after a student exchange. At present, EMREX is operational in a number of countries in Europe. It is a technical solution used to securely exchange educational data between students and third parties, for example higher education institutions (HEIs) or potential employers. In this way, EMREX can facilitate student mobility and decrease the administrative burden of student exchanges for the institutions. EMREX uses an open source technical solution, through which different kinds of educational data can be transferred, be it transcript of records or entire diplomas.

The Vietsch Foundation grant will serve two objectives:

• Industrializing the EMREX registry and reviewing the ELMO standard
• Dissemination of EMREX services and building the EMREX brand

This will help EMREX to make a step-change towards a self-standing service which creates value to students and organizations in Europe and also globally.

The second edition of “Free and Open Source: Law, policy and practice” edited by Amanda Brock, has been published by Oxford University Press, as an “open access title” with pdf, html and e-reader freely available on an attribution basis, thanks to the generous funding of the Vietsch foundation.

The book is available for download, Open Access, as well as in printed format by Oxford University Press at this OUP link.

When we decided to fund this project we were particularly attracted by what Amanda Brock, told us: “ having managed to persuade an amazing group of contributors to write chapters for the second edition, we will create what I believe will be one of the most important collaborations in open source in 2020. It’s great that the legal and other advisory and support communities around open source, have been willing to pull together and commit their time to create this work. We will be going beyond the European slant of the first edition to a global viewpoint with authors from the US, including Stephen Walli and Ross Gardler on community and governance, Mark Radcliffe on Blockchain and McCoy Smith on copyright. All areas of IP will be covered. Miriam Ballhausen, will pick up on copyright litigation considering recent actions in her home country, Germany and Canonical’s Jilayne Lovejoy will write about contribution agreements. On the patent front, as well as an update of the existing chapter on Patent litigation from the Origin team, Peter Langley and Colm McKernan and Malcolm Bain’s introduction to patents, we will be joined by Knut Blind writing on standard essential patents and his recent report from the Commission. Pam Chesteck is of course covering trade marks while Carlo Piano considers competition and antitrust issues.

Mirko Böhme will explain the economic of open source and Andre Katz will look at All Things Open and open hardware. The Linux Foundation’s Shane Coughlan will write on Open Chain and Kate Stewart on SPDX while Redhat’s Richard Fontana and David Levine will write on Cloud. Iain Mitchell will look at public sector and Open Forum Europe’s Sachiko Muto public policy.

As well as editing, I will be looking at commercial and operational models in open source.

It will be an incredibly practical and useful text for lawyers, open source offices and people working on compliance, suitable for academics and those working at the code face.

The icing on the cake for me as editor of this book is to know that the book will be available to all through open access thanks to the Veitsch Foundation.

Look out for further updates on the book status over the next few months.”

Funded in 2019 – The Vietsch Foundation funds a study by the European Campus Card Association (ECCA) that will encompass requirements for cross-border trusted student eID credentials, and provide recommendations for a trusted student eID framework to support the provision of secure identification and authentication on a cross-border basis in Europe.

The study started on 10 September 2019 and will end in May 2020 with the publication of a report surveying state of the art and business aspects and issuing recommendations for the establishment of a cross-border Student eID Project.

The Vietsch Foundation has decided to fund a new project under the NLnet Research and Higher Education Technology Fund :

TRACKING EXPOSED

Algorithms are the technological solution to the information overload: they are as powerful as necessary to manage the overflow of data that reaches us. Unfortunately, they can also conceal the existence and use of assessments and judgments that impact the dissemination of ideas and culture. No one should be allowed to abuse such power over connected people. At this stage, consent is nor informed nor optional.

The main objective of the project is to put a spotlight on users’ tracking, profiling, on the data market and on the influence of algorithms. As long as these phenomena are shielded from view or understood only by experts, they cannot be tackled with the political determination that problems of such magnitude deserve. That is why we strive to explain the issue, test and promote new solutions, developed to benefit the community.

Project URL https://tracking.exposed/