This contract award notice informs interested operators about the outcome of a tender.

On 29 January 2020, a contract notice was published as part of the EU project Archiver to purchase R&D services from a number of R&D providers in parallel (PCP procurement).

The PCP procurement compared competing alternative solution approaches to address the challenge of long term, preservation and archiving for scientific data in the petabyte volume range under F.A.I.R. principles following the OAIS reference model and related standards, while ensuring that research groups retain stewardship of their data sets. The innovative resulting services are expected to be integrated to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service catalogue.

This PCP procurement is a joint procurement by different procurers across Europe that are all facing the same common challenge and are thus looking for similar solutions (so-called ‘buyers group’).

The procurement was announced in the form of a pre-commercial procurement (PCP) with a phased approach, i.e. a framework agreement covering 3 R&D phases:

• R&D up to solution design,

• R&D up to prototype,

• R&D up to original development and validation and testing of a limited set of first products or services.

After each phase, intermediate evaluations are carried out to progressively select the best competing solutions. The contractors with the best-value-for-money solutions will be offered a specific contract for the next phase.

A total budget of 3.4 MEUR was earmarked for awarding the contracts to a minimum of:

— 5 contractors for phase 1

— 3 contractors for phase 2, and

— 2 contractors for phase 3.

Sufficient amount of good quality tenders were received to award the planned amount of contracts.

The PCP is expected to start in June 2020 and end in December 2021.