The Open Science Commons for the European Research Area

Abstract

Nowadays, research practice in all scientific disciplines is increasingly, and in many cases exclusively, data driven. Knowledge of how to use tools to manipulate research data, and the availability of e-Infrastructures to support them for data storage, processing, analysis and preservation, is fundamental. In parallel, new types of communities are forming around interests in digital tools, computing facilities and data repositories. By making infrastructure services, community engagement and training inseparable, existing communities can be empowered by new ways of doing research, and new communities can be created around tools and data. Europe is ideally positioned to become a world leader as provider of research data for the benefit of research communities and the wider economy and society. Europe would benefit from an integrated infrastructure where data and computing services for big data can be easily shared and reused. This is particularly challenging in EO given the volumes and variety of the data that make scalable access difficult, if not impossible, to individual researchers and small groups (i.e. to the so-called long tail of science). To overcome this limitation, as part of the European Commission Digital Single Market strategy, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative was launched in April 2016, with the final aim to realise the European Research Area (ERA) and raise research to the next level. It promotes not only scientific excellence and data reuse, but also job growth and increased competitiveness in Europe, and results in Europe-wide cost efficiencies in scientific infrastructure through the promotion of interoperability on an unprecedented scale. This chapter analyses existing barriers to achieve this aim and proposes the Open Science Commons as the fundamental principles to create an EOSC able to offer an integrated infrastructure for the depositing, sharing and reuse of big data, including Earth Observation (EO) data, leveraging and enhancing the current e-Infrastructure landscape, through standardization, interoperability, policy and governance. Finally, it is shown how an EOSC built on e-Infrastructures can improve the discovery, retrieval and processing capabilities of EO data, offering virtualised access to geographically distributed data and the computing necessary to manipulate and manage large volumes. Well-established e-Infrastructure services could provide a set of reusable components to accelerate the development of exploitation platforms for satellite data solving common problems, such as user authentication and authorisation, monitoring or accounting.