EOSC in the Nordics
competencies are located in the Nordic and Baltic countries and enhancing the visibility of service providers. “This is about creating a window on European infrastructure services. This can lead to collaboration not only between researchers in the same discipline, but also across disciplines,” says Krøl Andersen. “One good example in EOSC-Nordic is the adoption of an infrastructure toolbox from the lifesciences by the climate research community in the Nordic countries. EOSC is also about sharing tools and algorithms across disciplines.” The central topic in EOSC is enabling datasharing between researchers, and it’s important here to ensure that data meets the FAIR principles (that data is Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Re-usable). The Research Data Alliance and the GoFAIR organisation develops standards on how to make data FAIR, and researchers, data owners and data repositories have some clear guidelines to follow. “It’s about making a structured meta-data about your data. Meta data describes what the raw data is about,” explains Abdulrahman Azab, a Senior Adviser to the NeIC Executive team. Evaluation tools are
data is FAIR this will be very easy, and it won’t be necessary for researchers to take several days to look for a hard disc or memory stick.” The aim now is to promote the ideals of open science and develop recommendations on how researchers can be encouraged to share their data in a way that meets the FAIR principles. A lot of attention is focused on finding ways to incentivise researchers to share their data. “This is about rewarding and encouraging openness. In future it may be that researchers would get credit not only for publishing results as articles, and getting lots of citations, but also that their datasets would get citations,” says Dr Høst. By encouraging the wider adoption of FAIR principles, the project aims to help enhance the transparency of scientific procedures and the reproduceability of results, which Dr Høst says is central to the open science movement. “The wider ambition is to create an environment or space where other scientists, through the description of an experiment and the results, will be able to take the data and then try to reproduce the results,” he outlines. “This is not really possible at the moment.”
The ambition is to create an environment or space where other scientists, through the description of an experiment and the results, will be able to take the data and try to reproduce the results.
The European Open Science Cloud is designed to provide researchers with a platform to share data and resources, helping unlock the societal value of scientific research. We spoke to Lene Krøl Andersen, Gudmund Høst and Abdulrahman Azab about the work of the EOSC-Nordic project in bringing this vision closer to reality in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
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The vision behind the European Open
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Science Cloud (EOSC) is to create an open space or platform where researchers across the continent can freely share data and access resources, which will open up science and bring significant benefits to wider society. Sharing data across borders can help medical researchers gain deeper insights into the root causes of different diseases for example. “If you could share data across borders you could collect data on many more patients and get more detailed results, as well as results on rare diseases,” points out Dr
Gudmund Høst, coordinator of the EOSCNordic project and director of the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC). Dr Høst and his colleagues in EOSC-Nordic are now working to implement the EOSC in the Nordic and Baltic region. “We aim to identify what services are out there, and how they can be adopted more widely and used across national borders,” says Lene Krøl Andersen, International Liaison at Computerome, The Danish National Life Science Supercomputing Center, and project manager of the EOSCNordic team.
EOSC-Nordic This is a regionally-based initiative, with the project bringing together partners from five Nordic and three Baltic countries, and NeIC is playing a key role in enabling regional collaboration. The countries represented in the project share many cultural and historical similarities, providing strong foundations for collaboration. “This has been a joint venture from the very beginning,” stresses Krøl Andersen. The project partners are working together on different aspects of the project’s agenda, including identifying where specific
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also available for repositories, a topic that Azab and his colleagues in the project are addressing. “For example, we have developed a protocol that can evaluate the FAIRness of your repository. Are the data records in your repository FAIR? To what extent are they FAIR?” he outlines. “The answer to this isn’t a simple yes or no, but evaluation tools are available, and certain organizations like CoreTrustSeal, which is supported by the FAIRsFAIR community, provide certification for repositories that meet FAIR standards.” This concept is fairly well-known, yet not all scientists take great care to ensure that their data meets the FAIR principles. The priority for most scientists is typically to pursue their own research interests rather than ensure their data is accessible to others who may be interested. “The majority of researchers don’t really put a lot of emphasis on making their data FAIR. In some cases, they store their data on laptops and on local discs,” outlines Azab. This makes it difficult for other scientists to then follow up on their results and maybe use them in their own work. “When you publish an article and put forward arguments, you should be able to answer questions from colleagues who contact you and also provide access to the data. This doesn’t always happen however,” acknowledges Azab. “When the
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Societal value A greater degree of data-sharing and opennness would also release the societal value of scientific research, spurring innovation and accelerating technological progress. There are several steps to take before this wider vision can be realised, and Krøl Andersen says the project is making an important contribution in this respect. “We need to improve data accessibility, to share tools, and to build competence across the whole of Europe,” she says. This involves a lot of stakeholders, with the project working to put in place strong foundations to support open science into the future. “We are working with policy-makers, researchers and archiveholders, as well as librarians, universities and infrastructure providers, among others. We have a lot of stakeholders that need to understand the same language and to collaborate,” continues Krøl Andersen. “The Nordic-Baltic region is a wonderful testbed for showcasing and pilot cross-country data sharing solutions (among many other issues). Based on the regional governance structure (i.e. the Nordic Council of Ministers), and its interlinked institution of Nordforsk & NeIC; the NordicBaltic regional infrastructural developments are paving the way for European as well as global scalability across all stakeholders.”
EOSC in the Nordics Project Objectives
EOSC-Nordic aims to facilitate the coordination of EOSC relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit synergies to achieve greater harmonisation at policy and service provisioning across these countries, in compliance with EOSC agreed standards and practices. By doing so, the project seeks to establish the Nordic and Baltic countries as frontrunners in the take-up of the EOSC concept, principles and approach. EOSCNordic brings together a strong consortium of 24 partners including e-Infrastructure providers, research performing organisations and expert networks.
Project Funding
The EOSC-Nordic project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 857652.
Project Partners
https://www.eosc-nordic.eu/eosc-nordic-partners/
Contact Details
Lene Krøl Andersen, Ph.D., eMBA International Liaison, Computerome Project Manager, EOSC-Nordic Chair of Technical Advisory Board, DiSSCo Technical University of Denmark Produktionstorvet Building 426, 1 floor, room 122 2800 Kongens Lyngby T: +45 4119 0910 E: lka@dtu.dk W: www.eosc-nordic.eu Gudmund Høst Lene Krøl Andersen Abdulrahman Azab
Gudmund Høst is the Director of the Nordic e-Infrastructure Collaboration (NeIC). He previously held positions at the Research Council of Norway, the Norwegian Computing Centre and in the Department of Oceanography and Wave Statistics at DNV. Lene Krøl Andersen is International Liaison at Computerome, The National LifeScience Supercomputing Center in Denmark and the EOSC-Nordic Project Manager. She holds a PhD in agronomy, and an MBA degree. Abdulrahman Azab is a senior adviser in the NeIC management office. He previously worked in senior positions in both the academic and commercial sectors. Abdulrahman is an HPC environment specialist at the EuroHPCLUMI User Support Team (LUST).
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