Posters

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The posters will be showcased for the full duration of the event and will be presented at the EOSC Key Exploitable Results Session on Wednesday 27th of November 2019, 11.30-13.00 CET, Room: Helia conference hall.

Back to the EOSC Symposium.

1. B2FIND, Finding Research Data across Disciplines

The metadata service B2FIND is the central indexing tool for EOSC-hub and plays a key role within the pan-European collaborative research data infrastructure EUDAT-CDI by providing a simple and user-friendly discovery portal to find and access research data collections stored in EUDAT data centers and in community specific repositories. The metadata collected from these heterogeneous sources are stored in a comprehensive joint metadata catalogue and made searchable via an open data portal. B2FIND provides transparent access to the scientific data objects through references and identifiers. The implemented metadata ingestion workflow consists of three steps. First metadata records - provided either by various research communities or via other EUDAT services - are harvested. Afterwards, the raw metadata records are converted and mapped to unified key-value dictionaries as specified by the B2FIND schema. The most subtle and challenging task at this point is to map non-uniform, community specific metadata to homogenous structured metadata records. To assure and improve metadata quality this mapping process is accompanied by

  • iterative and intense exchange with community representatives
  • usage of controlled vocabularies and community specific ontologies and
  • formal and semantic mapping and validation.

Lastly, the mapped and checked records are uploaded to the catalogue, which is based on CKAN, an open source data portal software that provides a rich RESTful JSON API and uses SOLR for indexing.

Top 3 exploitable results:

  1. As the central EOSC-hub discovery portal for research data, B2FIND offers facetted search functionalities across research areas and scientific domains, narrow down options and access to research data within and beyond EOSC-hub.
  2. B2FIND already provides metadata of high quality research data from national, European and international research communities and data providers, thus enhancing the visibility of scientific outcome in Europe.
  3. By intensive communication with Communities and Data Providers, B2FIND aims to foster metadata standardization and exchangeability, offering Guidance for metadata ingestion and initiating Collaboration projects related to interdisciplinary issues (e.g. Classification for Research Areas, CLARA).

Community relevance: for everybody; cross-discipline research data; for researchers as well as citizen scientists Exploitability: B2FIND is already fully exploitable and openly accessible at http://b2find.eudat.eu/

2. BE OPEN - European forum and oBsErvatory for OPEN science in transport

The BE OPEN “European forum and oBsErvatory for OPEN science in transport” project aims to create a common understanding on the practical impact of Open Science and to identify and put in place the mechanisms to make it a reality in transport research.

Achieving Open Access to publications, making their underlying data FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and open where possible, and using open and collaborative processes and infrastructure via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) are key factors in making transportation researchers share-reuse-reproduce science and in bringing such a critical sector closer to the society for enabling open innovation and citizen science. Openness, transparency, fairness, reproducibility of science are key aspects around which BE OPEN will seek to establish the ground rules for the transport research communities, ultimately establishing a community of transport research organizations willing to work on the basis of a commonly agreed “Open Science Code of Conduct”.

 

To this end, BE OPEN has brought on board key transport and open science related communities in a two-fold action plan: to engage them in a participatory approach fostering a dialogue on Open Science (what exists, what should be done, how it should be done) among relevant stakeholders in Europe and around the world, and develop a detailed roadmap for the implementation of sustainable open science modules which include key practices, infrastructures, policies and business models, all taking into account the specificities of the transport research domain, and the use and integration of existing-infrastructures and the emerging EOSC initiative.

The BE OPEN can (and is willing to) contribute to the EOSC Working groups, in sense that the project planned work and outputs fits and feeds the main goals of the EOSC groups, as explained below.

EOSC WG FAIR and EOSC WG Architecture <-> Under WP3 “Open Access in Transport Observatory and Forum”, BE OPEN will define the necessary competences as well as the basic service deployment for setting up the European Open Science in Transport Forum (TOPOS forum), propose new schemes for membership and governance, new business rules and interfaces, and related impact assessment and sustainability analysis. Ultimately, BE OPEN will assess the data/information, technical or legal interoperability barriers and to identify appropriate mitigation strategies.

EOSC WG Rules of participation <-> Under WP4 “Code of Conduct on Open Science in Transport”, BE OPEN will design a Code of Conduct for adopting Open Science principles in transport research, looking in details at legal issues and fundamental principles, open and/or FAIR big data in transport (specification, use and re-use, visualization, analytics) and business models.

EOSC WG Landscape <-> Part of the work already done under WP2 “Mapping of existing Open Science sources in transport” was to analyse the existing open access publications and the performance of the European transport research and also the Open/FAIR data, software and infrastructures. Further ahead, BE OPEN will also look at the challenges and opportunities for aligning Transport Research with EOSC and map governance and operational/business models, preparing the knowledge on Open Science in Transport research for the future. These outcomes can also support the EOSC WG Sustainability.

EOSC WG Sustainability <->Under WP5 “Guidance for promoting Open Science in Transport research”, BE OPEN will deliver a Roadmap and guidelines to promote Open Science in transport research, based on the FAIR principles to ensure the successful implementation of promoting Open Science in the area of transport.

3. Blue-Cloud - Piloting innovative services for Marine Research & The Blue Economy

The Blue-Cloud project aims to become the reference point for the “Blue community” in the need of data, analytics tools and computing resources in EOSC and in the future Blue Economy & marine research landscape. In thirty-six months, Blue-Cloud aims to address the need to build and demonstrate the Pilot Blue Cloud as a thematic EOSC cloud to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability, through a set of five compelling pilot Blue-Cloud demonstrators (Zoo and Phytoplankton; Plankton Genomics; Marine Environment Indicators; Fish and Aquaculture Monitor).

Blue-Cloud supports research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability. The project will engage with many different stakeholders, especially Blue Data Infrastructures & Research Infrastructures, Horizontal e-Infrastructures, Research & Academia Organisations, Industrial players & Trade Associations, as well as Policy & Decision Makers.

Blue-Cloud aims to pilot a cyber-platform bringing together and providing access to:

  1. Multidisciplinary data from observations and models
  2. Analytical tools
  3. Computing facilities essential to support research to better understand and manage the many aspects of ocean sustainability.

From Blue-Cloud main assets, 3 of them can contribute to the EOSC establishment. and are indicated below. To ensure service adoption by key stakeholders, before the end of Blue-Cloud project, synergies with EOSC projects and EU bodies will be established, as well as leveraging with industrial players.

  • Blue Cloud Data and Services Catalogue: an easy access point to blue data resources and services provided by existing federated blue e-infrastructures
  • A framework for EOSC thematic cloud: A reference model for other thematic clouds.
  • Blue Cloud Strategic Roadmap 2030 development: Future strategic development of the Blue Cloud as a leading component of EOSC and as essential platform for synergizing infrastructure developments as part of the COPERNICUS, EMODnet, ESFRI, EOOS, and other initiatives.

Furthermore, Blue-Cloud aims to contribute to the EOSC by joining WGs, participating open consultations and RDA & EOSC key-events, liaising with cluster projects & other thematic clouds to share requirements/challenges. Finally, the Blue-Cloud will focus its work on identifying how each of its asset can fit in the EOSC and the wider Marine area landscape offer for EU/international researchers.

4. DCC - The Digital Curation Centre

The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) advances open science and research data management agendas by providing practical guidance, services and consultancy on a diverse range of topics. Our wide range of skills and staff expertise means we could contribute to many EOSC Working Groups, specifically training, international collaboration, FAIR and Rules of Participation.

Our top three exploitable results are training, consultancy and DMPonline. All of these are fully operational mature services which are already adopted by the international community:

The DCC offers training in a number of areas. We have trained European Commission project officers on reviewing Data Management Plans, teach researchers data management and open science on the RDA/CODATA schools, and most recently we ran a MOOC on developing Research Data Management services which had over 1400 learners from 116 countries. We have an established model for delivering training services for others and run our programme across Europe and internationally. Privately contracted courses are charged based on the effort required to develop and deliver them, while individual registration fees are charged for public courses - http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/request-training-session

A wide portfolio of international organisations use DCC consultancy services, including researcher funders, data centres, universities and international bodies such as the World Bank and OECD. We provide support on research policy,digital skills, RDM services and several other topics as requested. As a potential service to expose via EOSC, DCC consultancy is relevant to any organisations involved in digital preservation, research data management or open science.

DMPonline (https://dmponline.dcc.ac.uk) is the widest adopted Data Management Planning tool in Europe and as such is a key service for EOSC. It was launched in 2010 and has over 17,000 users and 45 subscribing institutions in the UK, Ireland, Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and Australia. The service is based on the open source DMPRoadmap codebase, which we jointly develop with the California Digital Library. DMPonline is a free service for end users. We employ a freemium model in order to support the costs of service delivery and ongoing inputs to the code development. Research institutions and funders can subscribe on an individual or national basis for a range of service levels. Our basic subscription provides administrator access to customise the tool by adding templates, guidance and braining. Enhanced subscription provides a custom URL and front-end, as well as supported use of the API.

The DCC is/was engaged in several EOSC-related projects, including FAIRsFAIR, EOSCPilot, FAIR4Health, FOSTER, OpenAIRE, EUDAT and EOSCPilot. The services we offer are separate to these projects however, hence submitting an organisational poster to focus on the range of inputs that we can provide to EOSC.

5. EKaaS - Elastic Kubernetes as a Service

Elastic Kubernetes as a Service (EKaaS) is a service to deploy self-managed and customised Kubernetes clusters as a service with additional capabilities to support specific hardware backends in the EGI Federated Cloud.

EKaaS is integrated in the EGI Long Tail of Science Portal connected to the VO EGI Access to facilitate new users to deploy on the EGI compute cloud resources not only the processing back-end in the form of a Kubernetes cluster but a set of applications as Helm charts.

EKaaS tries to reduce the effort of researchers on setting up conventional services used in research, especially for the Long-tail-of-science, by providing simplified interfaces and a catalogue of software as well as seamlessly interfacing with existing infrastructures to reduce the cloud management and administration burden of computing clusters.

The current version uses an extended version of EC3 (Elastic Compute Clusters in the Cloud - https://www.grycap.upv.es/ec3) that supports OASIS TOSCA infrastructure as code specifications. The new TOSCA specification for the elastic Kubernetes.

In such aim, EKaaS provides the user with a convenient and user-friendly interface to customise, deploy and manage the Kubernetes cluster, including the integration of software management components such as Helm for managing applications on the cluster. The clusters will be self-managed thanks to CLUES, an elasticity management service that powers on and off physical or virtual resources on-demand, according to the workload. Infrastructure Manager, an orchestration system already integrated into the EGI Federated Cloud infrastructure performs the deployment of the cluster.A set of application examples will be developed and integrated into the catalogue to address common problems arising in scientific communities.

6. EOSC-hub, Services for the European Open Science Cloud

This poster provides a short outline of selected EOSC-hub Key Exploitable Results (KERs) that are already in continuous, operational use and broadly adopted as mechanisms that support the federated service provision. All three highlighted KERs are primarily relevant for the architecture group and due to their general nature relevant to a number of stakeholder groups. The KERs presented in this poster are as follows:

  1. EOSC Portal and Marketplace - Contributes to Architecture EOSC Portal website was created by a collaboration between EOSC-hub, OpenAIRE and partners from the former eInfraCentral project. It serves Service Providers, Researchers and Research Communities and Enterprise stakeholders and supports federated service ecosystem (service discovery and access to market).
  2. Service Management System (SMS) - Contributes to Architecture and Rules of Participation SMS comprises all activities by service providers to plan, deliver, operate and control services offered to customers. SMS is a critical in integrating different providers into the common marketplace and monitoring frameworks in a way that provides value for EOSC.
  3. Internal Services in the Hub Portfolio - Contributes to Architecture This KER provides a common toolset for integrating services to EOSC ecosystem. A mature implementation will both streamline the processes of the Hub operators and reduce the integration efforts needed by the service providers.

The poster provides also some background information about the project and the overall set of KERS of the project

7. EOSC Pillar - Coordination and Harmonisation of National & Thematic Initiatives to support EOSC

EOSC-Pillar will coordinate national Open Science efforts across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy, and ensure their contribution and readiness for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Three key exploitable results that EOSC-Pillar will bring to EOSC can bu summarised through the following:

  • LANDSCAPING: A comprehensive understanding on the state of open research data and service across central Europe through an extensive survey and its analysis
  • SERVICES: New services integrated into EOSC from national initiatives and its Open Call, tested through use cases as well as tools and training for the promotion of FAIR culture
  • SUSTAINABILITY: Policy and legal framework as well as business models that wil allow the sustainability of EOSC-Pillar services even after the project's conclusion

EOSC-Pillar is part of EOSC regional projects funded under the INFRAEOSC 5b call and will work in sync with other regional projects as they coordinate the efforts of the national and thematic initiatives in making a coherent contribution to EOSC. While the project involves only five countries in Europe, the aim is to demonstrate that a localised approach to the implementation of the EOSC through a science-driven method, is efficient, scalable and sustainable, and can be effectively rolled out in other countries. National initiatives are the key of EOSC-Pillar’s strategy for their capacity to attract and coordinate many elements of the complex EOSC ecosystem and for their sustainability, adding resilience. By federating them through common policies, FAIR services, shared standards, and technical choices, EOSC-Pillar will be a catalyst for science-driven, transnational, open data and open science services offered through the EOSC Portal.

8. EOSC Services Need Local Support, University of Helsinki / Helsinki University Library
Finnish Open Science Open Data Expert Panel Working Group RDM Support Services for Researcher

For researchers EOSC services are hard to find. Organizational level support services can help to make EOSC services to be better known and to increase the use of them. On the other hand, it is not clear to all organizations how to organize support services, especially if the resources are very limited.

This poster presents work done in the Finnish Open Science Open Data Expert Panel Working Group (1) RDM support services for researcher (formerly Open data services for researcher). Registration to the working group was voluntary as part of forming National Open Science Expert Panels and working groups in autumn 2018. Now there are 42 members in our working group from universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutes, service providers and research funding organizations.

One aim of the working group is to make a list of things/capabilities research support services should provide to researchers to help them to use e.g. EOSC services to comply with the requirements of the responsible research data management (2). As reference, we have cases from University of Helsinki (3), University of Jyväskylä (4) and University of Turku (5) to show how research data management support is organized and the variety of capabilities needed.

When we relate EOSC services to this work, we have two questions:

Question 1: How to find EOSC services?

Answer 1: Use one of the several portals and catalogues introducing EOSC services:

Question 2: Should we instruct researchers to search services from these sources?

Answer 2: No. They are too complicated for searching, if you are not familiar with these services. We need support services helping researcher in finding appropriate services for their discipline and data. This was feedback for example in the OpenAIRE National Event Making sense of Open Science Jungle (6).

Second answer means that we need local support services to enhance the use of the EOSC services.

To share ideas of support services we made a three level list including minimum, desired and ideal level lists. Minimum list is for the organizations, which are planning or starting providing support services. Desired level for those advanced, who have resources to do something more than minimum. Ideal level is to show the direction where we want to go, a dream. Fourteen members of our group made lists in two workshops in the beginning of October. We used user stories from Project Mildred (7) as basis for listing services, but we created also new user stories. After workshops lists were published in the TUHA-wikipage (8) for commenting, which is ongoing now, when this proposal is written. In the poster commented lists will be presented.

User stories used in the workshops (knowing that the list is not exhaustive):

  • As researcher, I want to send my DMP for commenting, to be sure that my DMP is valid/sufficient
  • As researcher, I want to move my data from personal storage device to storage service outside my organization, in order to make it possible for researcher outside my organisation to use this data
  • As researcher, I want to store non-anonymized data to data repository or data bank etc., to secure safe storage and reuse
  • As researcher, I want to open data linkable, to enhance visibility and reuse of my data
  • As researcher, I want to publish the metadata of my research data, to increase the visibility and findability of my research
  • As research, I want to find information about the best DMP practices recommended by funders, to get funding
  • As researcher/PI/research coordinator, I want to know which contracts I have to have to manage use rights and licenses of the research data and I want tools to help in making contracts, to manage the rights to use the data in order to give persons, who are entitled according to contracts, to access and use the data
  • As a member of research support service staff / expert, I can easily evaluate and comment DMPs, to help researcher get funding
  • As research, I want to contact research support service using any channel I want to use

Next steps

  • updating lists based on the comments
  • more user stories and refining the support services list
  • international landscape mapping, e.g. RDA Libraries for Research Data IG
  • following the use of the lists in the participating organizations

References

Top 3 exploitable results

  1. Three level list of RDM support services for organizations to be used in planning and developing RDM support services.
  2. User stories related to the RDM support services to understand the needs of different stakeholders.
  3. Example of national level cooperation in defining needs and contents of RDM services.

Which EOSC EB Working Group you can contribute to?

Sustainability WG, because EOSC services need support from organizational level to be used by researchers and also Landscape WG, because these organizational support services are important part of the RDM ecosystem.

Which community the result is relevant to?

For Research data management support staff as reference/benchmark list of capabilities needed. For researchers better understanding of the EOSC services, when they select services to be used during the research process. For EOSC Service providers requirements, what kind of information local support services need in order to enhance use of the EOSC Services.

When the results will be fully exploitable? Q1/2020

9. EOSC-Synergy - Building capacity, developing capability

The EOSC-SYNERGY project will push the EOSC state-of-the-art in software and services life-cycle through a quality-driven approach to services integration that will promote the convergence and alignment towards EOSC standards and best practices.

The project will integrate national infrastructure services, thematic services and data repositories within the EOSC platform, so that they can be more easily found, accessed and used. Making these resources properly available in EOSC often requires specific knowledge, harmonization and integration. To support and foster the integration of these and other prospective resources, the project will implement a quality driven approach aimed at streamlining the integration process and reward efforts towards quality. The objective is to provide incentives to service developers and service providers towards the adoption of processes and guidelines that ultimately contribute to improve the quality and therefore the reliability of the services and related software integration. This will be achieved by making the conformance and positive attributes of the services more visible. It is expected that such additional visibility will lead to increased adoption by developers and providers, furthermore it will also spread the software quality culture in software development, not only in EOSC but in the long-tail. Finally the end-users will also benefit from having a more systematic access to the quality attributes of the EOSC services and their underlying software integration.

From the Software and services quality perspective the three key exploitable results form EOSC-SYNERGY are:

  • A maturity baseline for EOSC software and services that will contribute to improve quality, reliability, maturity, reusability, discoverability and transparency of the software
  • An EOSC service integration platform, that will put into practice the quality baseline and provide incentives for the adoption of quality practices
  • A technical framework to support the recommended FAIR data practices operationally.
10. EOSC-Synergy - Expand human capacity through training platforms aiming at promoting EOSC services

EOSC-synergy project,(https://www.eosc-synergy.eu/) coordinated by CSIC, Spain, extends the EOSC coordination to nine participating countries (Spain, Portugal, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Netherlands, UK, Germany, France) by harmonizing policies and federating relevant national research e-Infrastructures, scientific data and thematic services, bridging the gap between national initiatives and EOSC.

One of the key focus of the project is to expand the EOSC training and education capabilities through the introduction of an online platform aimed at boosting the development of EOSC skills and competences.

The platform will provide an environment for the easy creation and delivery of online training,with an accredited programme of training for users to ensure high quality material is produced. This will increase the training available to all EOSC stakeholders, reduce the learning curve to acquire the skills to become active in EOSC, and expand the EOSC training network.

The 3 main Key Exploitable Results proposed by this contribution are:

  • EOSC training platform - a point for the creation of EOSC training courses based on a sustainable platform for massive online courses using a self-deployable training infrastructure
  • Hackathon as a Service platform- facilitates organizing and conducting hackathons based on EOSC infrastructure in a very agile and dynamic environment
  • How to guides for trainers - facilitates the creation of high quality materials

The contribution will describe in detail approach for all the elements, and will be a base for further discussion and interaction between different EOSC initiatives that contribute to the training and skills development area of EOSC, and relevant working groups. The results of this initiative are relevant for whole EOSC community, and will be available for full exploitation at the end of 2020/beginning of 2021 (with beta versions in advance).

11. ESCAPE - European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures

ESCAPE is a single collaborative cluster of next generation European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) facilities in the area of astronomy- and accelerator-based particle physics in order to implement a functional link between the concerned ESFRI projects and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).ESCAPE puts together a cluster with ESFRI projects with aligned challenges of data-driven research, with demonstrated capabilities in addressing various stages of data workflow and concerned with fundamental research through complementary approaches. ESCAPE members are actively involved in the Architecture Working group. ESCAPE partners are major contributors to the innovation of distributed computing infrastructures and new computing architectures, e.g. federated computing infrastructures in the WLCG and EGEE/EGI initiatives, as well as national integrated supercomputing facilities (i.e. HPC centres, DiRAC , PRACE, etc). ESCAPE partners have direct involvement of ESFRI and other world-class projects to bring together software, services as well as datasets from telescopes, detectors and accelerators to develop a unique multi-messenger and cross-domain repository along with a science platform for fundamental science. The top ESCAPE services will include software repository, a flexible science platform for the analysis of open access data,virtual observatory, data lake cloud services will be delivered according to the FAIR principles fully exploitable by mid 2022.

12. FAIR4FUSION - Open access for fusion data in Europe

Name of Project: FAIR4Fusion

Goal - To increase the FAIRness of data in the fusion community allowing authorised community members to access data from any site.

Relevant EOSC Working Groups:

  1. FAIR - how can we know as we progress from the current situation to an improved situation.How can we score the FAIRness of the policies and services we create for the community
  2. Rules of Participation - How best to engage EOSC when most of the data produced by the community is not 'open'.Is having open metadata enough?
  3. Architecture - Can we make use of the architecture within the community, or how can we integrate our architecture into EOSC but maintain a highly restricted access to data produced
13. FAIRsFAIR - Fostering FAIR Data Practices in Europe

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) arises from the European Commission’s stated intention to increase the circulation and exploitation of knowledge by promoting open access to the data resulting from publicly funded research under Horizon 2020. Ensuring that research resources such as data, software and services can be rendered and maintained Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable (FAIR) is FAIRsFAIR’s contribution to the EOSC. The FAIRsFAIR White Paper on FAIR will pull out clustered analyses and recommendations that will be taken into consideration by the EOSC-FAIR working group while defining and implementing its FAIR work plan.

Exploitable result n.1: FAIR repository certification mechanism
In line with the “Turning FAIR into Reality” report from the European Commission expert group on FAIR data, FAIRsFAIR will augment existing certification mechanisms for digital data repositories, such as CoreTrustSeal. This WP will take an iterative approach to consider which elements of the requirements best support the enabling of FAIR data and where additional clarification might be required. This FAIR-oriented elaboration of core Trustworthy Digital Repository (TDR) requirements will provide the input for testing and revision of repository evaluationin the EOSC. The initial version of a repository certification mechanism to be released in May 2020. It is expected that the outcome of this activity is directly relevant to the EOSC FAIR WG.

Exploitable results n2: FAIRsSFAIR Competence framework
FAIRsFAIR is building on the successful CODATA/Research Data Alliance schools model, which provides early career researchers with foundational data science skills in an established and validated two-week curriculum. FAIRsFAIR is rolling out this model across Europe, propagating the skills by “training the trainers”, and supplying francised modules which can be tailored for a particular community. Together with this, the project is also mapping the integration of FAIR data principles in data science and other curricula at universities and analyse the landscape of available FAIR data trainings in Europe. The tangible result of this activity will be a FAIR data competence framework for higher education and professionals to support the development of a FAIR data culture, including model curricula and university courses for different disciplines (e.g. data science) and professional profiles (e.g. data stewards). The competence framework will contribute to the long term objective of the FAIR WG while perfectly feeding into a possible nascent EOSC Working Group on Training

Exploitable results n3: Recommendations on the implementation of open and FAIR practices within the EOSC.
As a crucial component of the FAIR ecosystem, FAIRsFAIR has been working to develop a snapshot of the FAIR data policy landscape in 2019 andto gain insights into how policies support or hinder the adoption of FAIR data principles in research practice. An open consultation was run between August and September 2019 focusing one Semantics and Interoperability and on Policy, Practice and Skills, with 106 responses received for the Policy, Practice and Skills questionnaire whose results are currently being analysed. A parallel desk research activity determined how far they currently reflect the stakeholder-specific, actions as recommended in the Turning FAIR into Reality Report. The main outcome of this activity will be a series of practical policy interventions to enhance existing or develop new policies in ways that ease adoption of FAIR. The results are going to be published in December 2019 and will be shared with the EOSC WG on FAIR, the Clusters and 5B projects as well as with the EOSC FAIR WG, while also shared with other initiatives (EOSC Hub, EOSC Pilot, FAIR4Health). This activity will be of relevance for the Rules of Participation WG.

14. OCRE - Open Clouds for Research Environments

The Open Clouds for Research Environments project (OCRE), aims to accelerate cloud adoption in the European research community, by bringing together cloud providers, Earth Observation (EO) organisations, companies and the research and education community. This will be achieved through ready-to-use service agreements and €9.5 million in adoption funding facilitated through cloud vouchers.

Three key exploitable results of OCRE for EOSC include:

  • COMMERCIAL CLOUD & EARTH OBSERVATION SERVICES: Through the OCRE Tender, OCRE will source commercial SaaS, PaaS and IaaS and digital Earth Observation services demanded by researchers.
  • LEGAL & TECHNICAL MECHAMISMS: OCRE will propose legal and technical mechanisms to integrate these supplementary commercial services into the EOSC.
  • BUSINESS MANAGEMENT PLATFORM: OCRE will develop a Business Management Platform to track services/resource consumption or usage.

Overall, OCRE provides a number of advantages for both the demand and supply sides of future EOSC commercial services. From the demand side, through OCRE, research institutions will be able to take advantage of innovative commercial services as the process will be more streamlined. Less time is needed to discover and acquire the services they need from the market. Researchers themselves, by benefiting from vouchers and increasing their uptake of commercial services from diverse providers, will enjoy better tools to carry out their work. On the supply side, for commercial cloud service providers, the legal, financial, and technical compliance barriers will be minimised. OCRE will make market requirements easier to understand, allowing them to tailor their offering to the research community. Specifically for earth observation SMEs, they will be introduced into the "marketplaces" used by research communities to procure services. This opens up new opportunities and provides them with a better view of the market for their niche solutions.

15. OpenAIRE - Services for Open Science

Since 2009, OpenAIRE has been serving research communities around Europe by facilitating compliance to the EC’s mandates on Open Access and implement Open Science publishing practices of transparency and reproducibility. Its technical services support scientists, project and research administrators, funders, and communities with added-value search, publishing, monitoring, interlinking functionalities on top of the OpenAIRE Research Graph, a massive collection of metadata records, today exposing the Open Access view of scientific publishing by interlinking more than 32 mi publications, 2 mi research data, and 111k software, with 20 funders and projects worldwide. The 3 main OpenAIRE Key Exploitable Results proposed by this contribution are:

  1. The BETA version of the OpenAIRE Research Graph, targeting the Open Science view of the scholarly record by including and interlinking Open Access and non-Open Access scientific products originating from both the scholarly communication infrastructure and the research infrastructures in Europe and beyond. The Open Science Graph thus supported by OpenAIRE (http://beta.explore.openaire.eu) is today out for Open Consultation and counts 110 Mi publications, 10mi datasets, 180K software and 28 funders, all interlinked by semantic relationships.
    https://www.openaire.eu/blogs/the-openaire-research-graph
  2. Amnesia, a data anonymisation tool that's key when dealing with personal and sensitive information but in need of sharing the data by publishing them.
  3. Provide, a full suite for content providers, including tools for content refinement, management and enrichment and usage statistics.
16. RDA - Research Data Alliance - Research Data Sharing without barriers

With over 9000 members (50% from Europe) and 87 working & interest groups (of which 25+ domain-specific), RDA is the strategic partner to represent the research data community for EOSC and to achieve progress in thematic areas that need a global approach. RDA is bringing a number of contributions to EOSC in the form of services as well as technical resources, all openly available across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society. RDA also already counts a wide variety of stories of implementation which are equally wide-ranging, addressing a diverse set of stakeholder groups and fully exploitable. The RDA Human factor - its community - is unique and transversal to all its activities and represent an additional resource that can contribute to the EOSC.

Exploitable result n.1: RDA Recommendations and outputs EOSC will be a federation of research data infrastructures, with the addition of a soft overlay to connect them and making them operate as one seamless European research data infrastructure. This kind of federated architecture is central to RDA vision of barrier removal and data sharing. A number of WG and IGs are developing recommendations and outputs relevant to barrier removal and data sharing, therefore bringing an impact on the EOSC Implementation Roadmap. In particular, the work released by groups such as - but this is a not-exhaustive list -the Brokering Framework WG, working for wider application of brokering techniques on data sources from research and scholarly communication; the National Data Services IG, working to increase efficiency for the individual operators of national data services; the Provenance Patterns Historical Group, that worked on finding, detailing and recommending best practices for tracking provenance for research data; or the RDA/CODATA Legal Interoperability IG, discussing legal interoperability solutions in interdisciplinary and international contexts, are relevant for the work of the EOSC Architecture WG.

Exploitable results n2: RDA International community RDA is a bottom-up organisation in a context where existing and new EOSC initiatives can collaborate on best practices, guidelines and standards with international partners, and where EOSC approaches can be promoted globally. The goals of groups such as the International Indigenous Data Sovereignty Interest Group, to mention one, are clearly aligned with the RDA mission of creating a global community to develop and adopt infrastructure that promotes data-sharing, data-driven research, and data use. The work of other groups such as Research Funders and Stakeholders on Open Research and Data Management, the Policies and Practices IG or the Data for Development IG, complement RDA’s goal of building the social and technical infrastructure to enable open sharing and re-use of data internationally, and matches with the objectives of the EOSC International Task Force.

Exploitable results n3: RDA contribution to FAIR data certification and practices RDA fosters the development of professional practices in research data management and stewardship on an international scale, specifically related to better culture and practical skills in research data management; developing FAIR data tools; fostering demand for FAIR data through consistent FAIR data mandates and incentives. These relate to all the aspects of FAIR data: making data Findable through catalogues of data and services and metadata; making data Accessible through Persistent Unique Identifiers and Data Management Plans; making data Interoperable through interoperable standards and common metadata; and making data Reusable, through common IPR and legal provisions such as Creative Commons. Furthermore, disciplinary interoperability frameworks are essential to the realisation of FAIR and fora, like RDA, are well-placed to encourage interdisciplinary and cross-profession exchange. Thanks to its strong liaisons there, RDA is already actively feeding all these results into the EOSC Working Group on FAIR.

17. SSHOC - A Marketplace for the Social Sciences and Humanities

One of the SSHOC project’s core objectives is to foster the transition from the current Social Sciences and Humanities landscape into a cloud-based infrastructure, that will operate according to the FAIR principles, offering access to research data and related services adapted to the needs of the SSH community. Furthermore, the tools, services, repositories and other resources brought in by project partners or generated during the course of the project will be featured in the SSH Marketplace.

The SSH Marketplace is contributing to the establishment of EOSC through several aspects:

  1. First of all, the SSH Marketplace offers a bridge between the EOSC and the SSH community - namely any SSH researcher and the supporting staff. This connexion has been thoughtfully prepared through the definition of its state of the art and user requirements specification. The research infrastructures (RI) involved in the SSHOC project have defined this objective through multiple exchanges with this very community. The agile and User Centered Design approaches are essential to better understand the end-users from the beginning: to better apprehend their expectations, understandings, but also fears regarding the broader European context within which the SSH Marketplace fits in. Indeed, how to better think the connexion between the community targeted through the different EOSC related Horizon 2020 projects and this very environment than by directly engaging with the future users? Aside from this user-centric approach, we also consult and rely on other expertises: national decision-makers, service providers, and other professional users. As such, this SSHOC project objective and result can be an input for the Landscape EOSC WG regarding the SSH research communities: like EOSC itself, the SSHOC project’s outputs are being shaped, thought and created by and for the research communities.
  2. Secondly, the SSH Marketplace adopts a process-oriented approach centered around the research workflows and practices, contextualising and interrelatingdatasets, tools, and services with tutorials, links to training material, user stories, showcases, and other relevant information. In other words, it will offer “contextualised solutions”. Let’s imagine that a researcher needs to perform a textual analysis on historical texts; the SSH Marketplace will offer not only software and services suitable for the task, but also tutorials explaining how to properly use the software, as well as academic articles, as well as other sources of scholarly information dealing with given task. Not only does this platform will offer a “contextualised solution” but thanks to the curation process, the quality of the content will be guaranteed.
  3. Last but not least, this SSH Marketplace shapes as one of the EOSC digital marketplaces, dedicated to SSH domain and focuses on a wide-access mode. Based on an iterative development process, its first release is planned for June 2020, followed by a second one in December 2020, before the final version one year after. The SSH Marketplace will be fully interoperable with the EOSC Marketplace. It aims to make use of EOSC Federating Core, especially the Federated Identity (AAI) services and the Helpdesk. A task force with relevant projects is set up to exchange and harmonize views on common themes and foster the contact with other European and international organizations operating in the EOSC.A specific attention will be paid to the OpenAire initiative and the possibility to relate to its catalogues. The SSH Marketplace can rely for the interoperability issues on the Data and Metadata Interoperability Hub being developed within SSHOC. This work can be seen as an input for the EOSC Architecture WG.

How will the Marketplace advance SSH and cross-disciplinary research?

  • Context: related materials such as code or data are linked, providing additional context
  • Support: users have access to appropriate training materials for their use of tools
  • Community: with the inclusion of user feedback or ratings, the Marketplace is a “Stack Overflow” for the SSH
  • Gap analysis: with all resources gathered in a central repository, it will be easier to identify the tools that don’t exist and should be developed to address specific research needs
  • Sustainability: a focus on curation and information quality, and the creation of a sustainable governance model and user community ensure the durability of the Marketplace over time
  • Serendipity: users find useful information they hadn’t thought to look for!

 

18. The Spanish Thematic Network in Open e-Science

The Spanish Thematic Network in Open e-Science aims to be an inclusive initiative that unites the efforts, shares information and fosters to strengthen the position of Spanish institutions in European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiatives. For this purpose, it involves a team of 14 groups that combines scientific communities, data providers, computational and storage resources and experts in process data services and scientific data integration. The network aims to promote communication among the groups by taking advantage of their positioning in six H2020 projects funded by INFRAEOSC and similar calls. The network aims to contribute to the EOSC building projects and EOSC Working Groups by interacting with the key stakeholders in Spain and supporting experts, and delegates with broader and in-depth information about the Spanish science community. Moreover, the network will also disseminate the results, conclusions and strategic plans across the Spanish research community, given its communication channels. The network will foster the involvement of Spanish researchers as EOSC service providers and consumers, being this aim the main Key Performance Indicator of the network.

Currently, the Spanish Network for Open e-Science inherits a dissemination channel with more than 350 researchers and plans to increase it up to 500 selected researchers covering more than 100 Spanish research groups.

The Spanish Network for Open e-Science gathers experts and delegates from four of the EOSC Working Groups, the EOSC GB, the e-IRG, GOFAIR and other strategic groups.

The network is currently funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, under the call for Research Networks of the National Program for Knowledge Generation and Scientific and Technologic Strengthen of the R&D system, under the action RED2018-102377-T.

 

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EOSCsecretariat.eu has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Programme call H2020-INFRAEOSC-05-2018-2019, Grant Agreement number 831644.