Strategy, Governance and Sustainability
As large, multidisciplinary infrastructures, OSCs around the world will face challenges of
governance, funding, sustainability, rules of participation, inclusivity, making their value
proposition, and engagement with researchers and existing research infrastructures and other
e-infrastructures. The specificities of national and regional circumstances mean that the
approaches of each OSC to these issues will often be relatively bespoke. Nevertheless, there is
much to be learnt from the exchange of experiences and strategies between initiatives. The WG
will likely proceed by providing a forum to exchange information and identifying a discrete
number of topics to explore in more detail. Possible initial questions include but are not
limited to: What are the governance and accountability structures? What are the mechanisms for
funding core OSC infrastructures and how does the OSC present its value proposition in order to
sustain operations? What are the rules of engagement for public and private institutions?
Policy and Legal
Statements of principle and policy instruments at national and transnational levels have sought
over the last 20 or so years to encourage and support emerging Open Science practices and to
create a ‘level playing field’ in which scientific outputs are Open by default. Regional policy,
as in the European Union, and international instruments, such as the recent OECD Declaration on
Access to Research Data from Public Funding and the forthcoming UNESCO Recommendation on Open
Science, are particularly significant. Different national concerns affect data policy
priorities: nevertheless, to avoid the development of large silos and to achieve the potential
of global Open Science, there is interest among OSCs to seek alignment of their policies, and
where possible their legal frameworks. The WG will likely proceed by exchanging information
about Open Science policies before exploring any areas of divergence. Possible questions include
but are not limited to: What are the key policy instruments adopted by the OSCs? To what extent
do these align and do they map well to major international statements of principle or policy?
Are there any areas of policy misalignment that could hamper cooperation among OSCs and projects
supported by OSCs? What are the most significant issues of legal interoperability to be
addressed?
Initial arrangement
The GOSC Initiative will be led by an international advisory board followed by a steering group
for the design and implementation of all the tasks. An international program office is on its
way to help fulfil daily governance tasks assigned by the AB and SG. Initialized working groups,
namely the Strategy, Governance and Sustainability, Policy and Legal, Technical Infrastructure,
Data Interoperability have been established to carry on detailed work planned within the
project. Another four early showcases (Space physics: Incoherent scatter radar data fusion and
computation, Biodiversity and Ecology: An open cloud service for camera trap data management and
intelligent analysis, Earth sciences: SDG-13 climate change and natural disasters, Population
health: Sensitive data federation analysis model in population health) are also arranged to
demonstrate the maturity of the GOSC testbed and lead to open discussion and call for broader
engagement in the long run.
Technical Infrastructure
Open Science Clouds necessarily build on existing global e-infrastructures, including provision
of high-speed academic networks, high performance computing, cloud computing, and so on. Among
the objectives is to facilitate connectivity among international e-Infrastructures at national,
regional, and global level, provide lightweight federation solutions and improve
interoperability between different systems, and support international research collaborations.
There are numerous important topics for e-infrastructure cooperation, alignment and
interoperability, including: network connectivity and protocols, secure Authentication and
Authorization Infrastructure (AAI), and mechanisms for federation of computing and other
services.
Data Interoperability
One important objective for OSCs is to enhance support for research that addresses the
fundamental challenges of our age (including global sustainability, disaster risk reduction and
so on). Such research topics often require an interdisciplinary approach and the ability to
combine data from across traditional domain boundaries. Many OSCs explicitly aim to support and
enhance the services provided by established Research Infrastructures, while also seeking to
break down the silos that may inhibit data sharing and interoperability. The FAIR principles
provide a framework for convergence and a number of topics can usefully be addressed to pursue
alignment and interoperability among OSCs. These include but are not limited to: the emerging
FAIR Digital Object Framework; the use of structural and provenance metadata to facilitate
machine-actionability across data; and the alignment and development of good practice for
semantic artefacts (including scientific vocabularies). The EOSC Interoperability Framework may
provide a good starting point for discussions around how to align and how OSCs can contribute
and engage with global efforts to address the I (interoperability) and the R (reusability) of
FAIR.
