Last year ALTER-Net wrote a letter of support for the Biodiversity Virtual e-Laboratory (BioVeL) proposal which got through the evaluation process to be funded by the EC FP7. The project is now in the process of signing the  EC Grant Agreement. A key component of the project is outreach and dissemination with the biodiversity research and informatics communities.

To that end they will establish "Friends of BioVeL". “Friends of BioVeL” are projects and organizations that support the objectives of the BioVeL project to deploy robust (web) services for biodiversity analysis and workflow and to encourage adoption of the workflow approach towards in-silico processing and analysis of biodiversity data. As a Friend of BioVeL ALTER-Net will be kept informed of future progresses.

BioVeL is due to start in September. the project coordinator is Alex Hardisty, Cardiff University, UK.