During this discussion, the Director General highlighted the involvement of the Executive Agency on Vine and Wine, represented by its Director, Mr Krasimir Koev, and made reference to various avenues that would enable Bulgaria to position itself as one of the leading viticultural countries in the Black Sea area. Among the activities envisaged, two areas could be given priority, namely the organisation of a regional scientific and technical forum in Bulgaria and the involvement of the country's university and professional sector in the OIV's Master's programme (the MSc OIV in Wine Management).

In addition, H.E. Mr Anguel Tcholakov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Bulgaria in France, supported the idea of organising a presentation of his country's wines at the OIV headquarters during the exhibition of Thracian treasures from Bulgaria, a cultural event that is to be held at the Louvre in spring 2015.

The Minister for Agriculture also stressed the importance she attached to strengthening the contribution of Bulgarian expertise within the OIV as part of the rural development programme, certain aspects of which particularly affect native table grapes and wine grapes.

Created in 2009 at the initiative of the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research, and uniting numerous professionals from universities and research organisations, the BSN ensures that any teacher-researcher, researcher or student has relevant scientific information and the most efficient tools possible available to them. The aim of this call for projects was to increase visibility and open-access dissemination in a digital environment of document corpora of major benefit to research.

In collaboration with the OIV, this project was supported by the University of Bourgogne and the National Center for Scientific Research acting on behalf of the French research institution, the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH) de Dijon, which has an Archives-Literature-Digitisation (Archives-Documentation-Numérisation, ADN) platform that is one of only a few in France to provide an data processing chain in its totality.

Attended by Mr Francis Aubert, Director of the MSH de Dijon, and Mr Yann Juban, Assistant to the Director General of the OIV, the first steering committee met in Dijon in order for the project's partners and service providers to discuss the different steps that should enable the collection to be made available online in 18 months' time, in June 2016. The technical phase of digitisation is already underway, with nearly 30% of texts processed. Discussions will be ongoing regarding tools for indexation and cataloguing, in order "to provide an interdisciplinary research tool for the use of the scientific community as well as professionals in the vine and wine sector or the general public ", as described by Professor Laurent Gautier, who took charge of the project.

This partnership supplements the new policy of digital scientific publication implemented by the OIV, which was presented by the Director General of the Organisation at the OIV General Assembly. The scientific publications presented at the Congress are now available on an OPEN ACCESS basis on the website http://oiv.edpsciences.org/ and in the Bio Web of Conferences journal. Mr Jean-Marie Aurand, indicating that this was the equivalent in volume of five years of the Bulletin, expressed his satisfaction that "these coordinated actions of the OIV can guarantee the sustainability and universality of access to international scientific and technical information in the vitivinicultural field."

This presentation follows the OIV Director General's visit in September to present, to professionals in the sector, the technical and scientific activities of the OIV, as well as to strengthen cooperation of expertise. The Director General of the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture, Mr Ramy Cohen, was delighted that, for the second time at the OIV headquarters, Israeli viticulture had the opportunity to become better known as one of the components of Mediterranean wine culture.