*2.4.2 Access to the research infrastructure for external researchers*

External scientists have open access to a chemical library, assay development and screening facilities, medicinal chemistry and informatics platforms. There are three main groups of researchers who will benefit from EU-OPENSCREEN:

**First**, molecular and cell biologists, biochemists, microbiologists, plant biologists etc. who develop assays which are amendable to screening and are interested in developing a chemical 'tool' compound for their biological target or pathway of interest to answer a biological question or, in the case of disease-relevant targets, develop new therapeutic approaches to addressing unmet medical needs for patients. These scientists benefit from the open access to the screening capabilities of EU-OPENSCREEN's screening partner sites. They are encouraged to contact and consult the central office of EU-OPENSCREEN, which acts as a single point of contact for external scientists, prior to submitting a project proposal. Depending on the proposal and project requirements, the central office identifies one or more partner sites within the network, which offer the appropriate technology and expertise. The technical feasibility and scientific novelty will be evaluated. After the project proposal has been accepted, the project is initiated in collaboration with a partner site by transferring the assay onto the screening platform. This process often involves further optimization and miniaturization into a 384-well or 1536-well plate format, with the external scientist, who developed the assay, being actively involved in this process at the screening facility. After the screening of the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection at the EU-OPENSCREEN screening site, data analysis and hit validation, a list with the validated hits will be available to the assay developer. The validated hits will be further optimized either with an EU-OPENSCREEN chemistry site or, if the assay provider already has an established collaboration for the hit-to-lead/tool optimization, with an external chemist.

**Second**, organic and medicinal chemists and pharmacologists who seek to expose their compounds to a large number of screens, and thereby a wide range of biological targets. They provide their compounds to EU-OPENSCREEN, so that their compounds are 'bio-profiled' and tested as part of the screening collection at the EU-OPENSCREEN partner sites. As chemists often have only limited opportunities to systematically annotate their compounds, their incentive to provide their compounds to EU-OPENSCREEN is the possibility to identify novel biological activities of their compounds. A similar approach to crowd-sourcing academic compounds has been applied over more than a decade within the French Chimiothèque

Nationale [30]. Another, more recent opportunity for chemists to screen their compounds is the CO-ADD (Community for Open Antimicrobial Drug Discovery) [31, 32] initiative, where chemists can test their compounds for antimicrobial activity against ESKAPE pathogens. These initiatives demonstrate that the prospect of receiving bioactivity data is a strong incentive for chemists to donate, and disclose the structure and associated bioactivity data of, their compounds.

**Third**, database users who use EU-OPENSCREEN's European Chemical Biology Database (ECBD) to access the bioactivity datasets generated during the screening projects. Importantly, the data will also be accessible through other established open data repositories including the ChEMBL database. Assay providers who screen the EU-OPENSCREEN compound library benefit from the ECBD for their own projects by having access to the public bioactivity data from previous projects, and at the same time, they also contribute to worldwide efforts on open science.

### *2.4.2.1 Access policy and procedure*

The democratization of access to state-of-the-art technology platforms, resources and expertise is the key objective of all European research infrastructure. Importantly, as a European open access research infrastructure, a common access policy and procedure is applied across its network of partner sites. EU-OPENSCREEN is accessible to researchers from academia and industry worldwide. The access to EU-OPENSCREEN by external researchers is in line with the 'European Charter for Access to Research Infrastructures—Principles and Guidelines for Access and Related Services' [33] published by the European Commission in 2016. The charter's guidelines describe three access modes, by which access to research infrastructures may be provided—these are excellence-driven, marketdriven and wide access. Excellence-driven access is provided to the majority of scientists who developed an assay and collaborate with EU-OPENSCREEN to implement a screening and/or hit optimization project as well as to chemists who provide their compounds to be incorporated in the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection. Scientists who use the ECBD will be provided wide access to the bioactivity data.

### **3. Conclusions**

In this book chapter, we described various academic collaboration models which aim to accelerate chemical too discovery. These initiatives differ in many aspects, for example in structure (e.g. individual academic research groups, public-private partnerships, research infrastructures; single-site vs. distributed/multinational), operational model (e.g. closed consortia, open-access research infrastructures), user communities, funding model (e.g. institutional funding, third-party funding over a defined funding period, long-term funding by member countries), access and data publication policies. Each of these initiatives complement each other and supports academic chemical biology and drug discovery.

### **Acknowledgements**

The authors would like to thank Ronald Frank (senior advisor of EU-OPENSCREEN, Berlin) and Anna-Lena Gustavsson (Head of the CBCS node at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm) for ideas and information related to the content of the manuscript.

**123**

**Author details**

Bahne Stechmann and Wolfgang Fecke\* EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC, Berlin, Germany

provided the original work is properly cited.

\*Address all correspondence to: wolfgang.fecke@eu-openscreen.eu

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,

*Accelerating Chemical Tool Discovery by Academic Collaborative Models*

ASCR Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic

ECBD European Chemical Biology Database

NIH National Institutes of Health NMR Nuclear magnetic resonance

CESNET association of universities of the Czech Republic and

ChEMBL chemical database of bioactive molecules with drug-like

ESKAPE acronym encompassing the names of six bacterial patho-

TOF-LC-MS Time-of-flight liquid chromatography mass spectroscopy

the Czech Academy of Sciences, operating the national e-infrastructure for science, research and education

properties, maintained by the European Bioinformatics Institute of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory

gens commonly associated with antimicrobial resistance

*DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91138*

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

**Conflict of interest**

**Abbreviations**

*Accelerating Chemical Tool Discovery by Academic Collaborative Models DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.91138*
