ABSTRACT
WP11 is dedicated to the management and coordination of the Transnational Access (TNA) and National Open Access (NOA) mobility programme of the ITSERR project, which promotes international and national research mobility by allowing and facilitating the access of PhD students and researchers in the early stages of their career to infrastructures, data, and expertise in the domain of Religious Studies. The ITSERR research mobility programme has been developed in close integration with the RESILIENCE TNA management. The programme foresees funded research stays for incoming mobility at the 5 ITSERR nodes for European, non-European, and Italian individual scholars or teams and outgoing mobility at RESILIENCE host institutions for ITSERR members.
RESULTS AND TOOLS
Through its TNA and NOA programme, ITSERR has strengthened RESILIENCE through specific features, such as excellence-driven service, designed to empower the scholarly community in Religious Studies. Between June 2024 and March 2026, a time span corresponding to the four access periods of the programme, 38 TNA and 18 NOA fellows were enabled to carry out funded research stays, with physical and virtual access to special collections, archives, libraries, IT and Digital Humanities labs, and specialised expertise. Incoming visiting researchers were integrated into the Work Package activities of the ITSERR project and took part in seminars, mentoring, and training on digital tools and source management, with concrete effects on their scientific outputs.
A further outcome of WP11 is the TNA Management Platform, a web-based system built on Drupal that supports the full lifecycle of the programme: publishing calls, submitting applications online, peer review, organising visits, and collecting feedback and final evaluations. The platform uses a role-based workflow with clear stages for calls, proposals, and visits, so that each step is transparent and traceable for applicants, hosts, reviewers, and administrators. It also integrates eligibility and funding rules, policy requirements, and feedback and impact-assessment forms, helping to streamline procedures and monitor the results and scientific contributions of each research stay.
TEAM
WP11 is led by the University of Palermo: the WP leader is Fabrizio D’Avenia, Full Professor and Principal Investigator (PI) of the ITSERR project at the University of Palermo, supervisor of all the activities, and the TNA officer is Gabriella Sciortino, Technologist at the University of Palermo, who coordinates the activities, the entire workflow, and the administrative effort necessary for the development of the research mobility programme.
BEYOND ITSERR
Together with the intangible outcomes generated by each ITSERR TNA stay, which significantly shape researchers’ professional trajectories, a key and lasting outcome of WP11 is the TNA Management Platform, conceived as a centralised, secure, and user-friendly digital ecosystem designed to support the entire lifecycle of activities involving Transnational and National Access programmes promoted by the ITSERR project. Moreover, it represents a shareable and reusable tool to implement not only the ITSERR TNA and NOA programmes, but also any TNA programme. The combination of physical mobility and digital access, supported by a configurable system based on workflows and project lifecycles, provides a scalable tool to build sustainable research ecosystems within the European Research Area, adaptable to different disciplines, types of facilities, and funding schemes.