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In the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, borders have become relevant (again) in political action and in people's everyday lives within a very short time. This was especially true for the inhabitants of border regions, whose cross-border life worlds were suddenly irritated by closed borders and police controls. However, the COVID-19 pandemic also led to an increased evidence of social, cultural, eco-nomic, health and mobility boundaries beyond national borders. The authors of this new issue of “UniGR-CBS Borders in Perspective” shed light on these dynamics from the perspective of territorial borders, social boundaries and (dis)continuities in border regions through a variety of thematic and spatial approaches. Their critical observations and scientific comments were made during the lockdown in April and May 2020 and provide insights into the events during the global pandemic. Im Zuge der COVID-19-Pandemie sind Grenzen binnen kürzester Zeit im politischen Handeln und im Alltag der Menschen (wieder) relevant geworden. Dies betraf in besonderem Maße die Bewohner*innen von Grenzregionen, deren grenzüberschreitende Lebenswelten plötzlich von geschlossenen Grenzen und polizeilichen Kontrollen irritiert wurden. Doch auch jenseits von Staatsgrenzen führte die COVID-19-Pandemie zu einer verstärkten Wahrnehmung von sozialen, kulturellen, wirtschaftlichen, gesundheitlichen und mobilitätsbezogenen Grenzen. Die Autor*innen der neuen Ausgabe von “UniGR-CBS Borders in Perspective” beleuchten diese Dynamiken aus dem Blickwinkel von territorialen Grenzen, sozialen Grenzziehungen und (Dis)Kontinuitäten in Grenzregionen über vielfältige thematische und räumliche Zugänge. Ihre kritischen Beobachtungen und wissenschaftlichen Kommentare sind während des Lockdown im April und Mai 2020 entstanden und geben Einblicke in das Zeitgeschehen während der globalen Pandemie. Au cours de la pandémie COVID-19, les frontières ont (re)pris de l'importance dans l'action politique et dans la vie quotidienne en très peu de temps. C'était particulièrement vrai pour les habitants des régions frontalières, dont le quotidien transfrontalier était soudainement irrité par la fermeture des frontières et les contrôles de police. Toutefois, la pandémie de COVID-19 a également entraîné une perception accrue des frontières sociales, culturelles, économiques, sanitaires et de mobilité au-delà des frontières nationales. Les auteurs de la nouvelle édition de l’« UniGR-CBS Borders in Perspective » éclairent ces dynamiques sous l'angle des frontières territoriales, des démarcations sociales et des (dis)continuités dans les régions frontalières par le biais de diverses approches thématiques et spatiales. Leurs observations critiques et commentaires scientifiques ont été faits pendant le confinement en avril et mai 2020 et donnent un aperçu des événements pendant la pandémie mondiale.

Background: High vaccination coverage rates are necessary to reduce infections and transmissions of the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing COVID-19 and to allow successful mitigation of the current pandemic. To date, we are still lacking information to explain the hesitancy in Luxembourg towards uptake of the available COVID-19 vaccines. The present study explored motivations for and against vaccination in a population-representative sample of residents across Luxembourg to identify hesitant groups and develop strategies to increase population immunity against SARS-CoV-2. Methods: In the framework of the nationwide, representative longitudinal CON-VINCE study, a sample of 1589 respondents (49.6% women, 84.3% Luxembourg nationality) ranging from 18-84 years, participated in the survey in spring 2021. The protocol of the CON-VINCE study has been described in detail elsewhere (Snoeck et al. 2020). Results: 52% of the respondents had at least partial vaccination at time of assessment between April to June 2021. The most common reasons for vaccination of those willing to be vaccinated (81.2%) were altruistic motivations. Prevalent reasons against vaccination for those undecided (8.7%) or reluctant (10.2%) to be vaccinated were that the vaccine had not been tested sufficiently and the fear of long-term vaccine side effects. Only very few of the vaccination-hesitant or -reluctant respondents reported that they did not believe in vaccination in general. Conclusion: The present study identified motivations for and against COVID-19 vaccination and determined demographic and socio-economic factors associated with vaccination willingness. To increase vaccination rates, public health communication needs to target those unsure or unwilling to be vaccinated. We will continue to study the vaccination uptake in the Luxembourg population, as CON-VINCE is now part of the H2020-funded international ORCHESTRA project (https://orchestra-cohort.eu), research into comparing these results on a Pan-European level.

As we mark the 50th anniversary of the Werner Report, it is well worth analysing the role of Economic and Monetary Union at a time of uncertainty as to the wider European project, via an interdisciplinary approach that draws on historical and archive research and takes into consideration the theoretical debates in the literature and the various methodological challenges.What are the multifaceted future provocation facing Economic and Monetary Union? What steps still need to be taken to complete the project? How can we strengthen the international role of the euro and bolster Europe’s economic and financial autonomy? How can we best tackle technological developments in the field of money and finance? And how is the COVID-19 crisis testing the boundaries of the European integration?

As a response to the global outbreak of the SARS-COVID-19 pandemic, authorities have enforced a number of measures including social distancing, travel restrictions that lead to the “temporary” closure of activities stemming from public services, schools, industry to local businesses. In this poster we draw the attention to the impact of such measures on urban environments and activities. For this, we use crowdsensed information available from datasets like Google Popular Times and Apple Maps to shed light on the changes undergone during the outbreak and the recovery

This WARCnet paper is the first in a series of interviews with Euro- pean web archivists who have been involved in special collections related to COVID-19. The aim of the series is to provide a general overview of COVID-19 web archives.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, a lot of research efforts were quickly redirected towards studies on SARS-CoV2 and COVID-19 disease, from the sequencing and assembly of viral genomes to the elaboration of robust testing methodologies and the development of treatment and vaccination strategies. At the same time, a flurry of scientific publications around SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 began to appear, making it increasingly difficult for researchers to stay up-to-date with latest trends and developments in this rapidly evolving field. The BioKB platform is a pipeline which, by exploiting text mining and semantic technologies, helps researchers easily access semantic content of thousands of abstracts and full text articles. The content of the articles is analysed and concepts from a range of contexts, including proteins, species, chemicals, diseases and biological processes are tagged based on existing dictionaries of controlled terms. Co-occurring concepts are classified based on their asserted relationship and the resulting subject-relation-object triples are stored in a publicly accessible human- and machine-readable knowledge base. All concepts in the BioKB dictionaries are linked to stable, persistent identifiers, either a resource accession such as an Ensembl, Uniprot or PubChem ID for genes, proteins and chemicals, or an ontology term ID for diseases, phenotypes and other ontology terms. In order to improve COVID-19 related text mining, we extended the underlying dictionaries to include many additional viral species (via NCBI Taxonomy identifiers), phenotypes from the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), COVID-related concepts including clinical and laboratory tests from the COVID-19 ontology, as well as additional diseases (DO) and biological processes (GO). We also added all viral proteins found in UniProt and gene entries from EntrezGene to increase the sensitivity of the text mining pipeline to viral data. To date, BioKB has indexed over 270’000 sentences from 21’935 publications relating to coronavirus infections, with publications dating from 1963 to 2021, 3’863 of which were published this year. We are currently working to further refine the text mining pipeline by training it on the extraction of increasingly complex relations such as protein-phenotype relationships. We are also regularly adding new terms to our dictionaries for areas where coverage is currently low, such as clinical and laboratory tests and procedures and novel drug treatments.

Presentation of the first results from the "Young People and COVID-19 (YAC)" study, combining results from an representative online survey and in-depth interviews

The Schengen Area is one of the pillars of the European project. But it has been affected by several difficulties: the serious consequences of the global economic and financial crisis (2008-2018), growing concerns over external migratory pressure and the question of enlargement, fears of social dumping and, since March 2020, the COVID-19 crisis. Identifying these obstacles is vital so that pragmatic solutions can be found without jeopardising the founding principle.

Although the idea of Europe dates back to ancient times and was crystallised in the Enlightenment, the plan for European unification emerged in the second half of the 20th century as a consequence of an economic process based on a single market and a single currency. European integration is therefore a recent chapter in the history of Europe, one which has been written before our very eyes, but it remains fragmented into disparate national histories. In the 21st century, those writing the history of Europe find themselves confronted with a threefold challenge: they must meet the demands of the digital age, adjust to the paradigm shift within the historical discipline and navigate the geopolitical upheavals that the continent has been experiencing since 1989 (the fall of communism; the enlargement of the European Union; the many crises the EU has faced, including Brexit; the divide between institutions and citizens; the socio-economic consequences of the global crisis, including the COVID-19 health crisis; the new nature of transatlantic relations, etc.).