Open infrastructure is one of the vital components within open science (UNESCO,2020). By
harnessing the most advanced research facilities and software, open infrastructure is to handle those massive
cross-disciplinary research resources. There’re already many e-infrastructures around the world,
notably the European Open Science Cloud from the European Commission, New Digital Research
Infrastructure Organization in Canada, the CSTCloud from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the
ARDC e-infrastructure in Australia, XSEDE and other research e-infrastructure related
initiatives in the US, the African Open Science Platform, etc.
Among all of these notable research e-infrastructures, we see the great potentials by better
connectivity and interoperability between each other. What if we can have an open science cloud
connecting more and more existing research facilities around the globe? The idea of a Global
Open Science Cloud (GOSC) was initiated during the CODATA 2019 Beijing conference. The mission
of GOSC is to interconnect different institutional, national and regional open science clouds
and platforms to create a global virtual environment for globalized research and innovation. It
aims to provide better ways to fully harness the global scientific research resources, and to
help bridge the divide in infrastructure, technique, and capacity building among different
countries, regions, and institutions.
The Global Open Science Cloud is to co-design and co-build a cross-continental federated
e-infrastructure and virtual research environment for global cooperation and open science by
harmonized policies, interoperable protocols, transparent services and sustained mechanism.
Network connectivity, secure AAI, computing federation, FAIR data, policy alignment, are all the
key components.
To strengthen the capacity of connectivity and interoperability between different research
platforms, Chinese Academy of Sciences funded an international partnership program recently.
This program is a five-year pilot project entitled as “GOSC Initiative” starting early 2021 by
CNIC, CAS.
GOSC refers to a cross-continental federated e-infrastructure and virtual research environment
for global cooperation and open science. The consolidated foundation for GOSC may include at
least five different layers. At the bottom, global network connectivity increases our capacity
for massive data transfer and online data processing. The upper-level cloud federation provides
federated services such as cloud computing, cloud storage, and federated data learning and
processing, etc. Next is the global open data fabric, in which we see converged research
resources, not only data themselves but also other related research resources, such as models
and algorithms, etc. Then the social community comes as the next layer supported by software
toolkits. Within this cloud federation, the virtual community facilitates open collaboration,
and open science and further, the applications at the top layer make GOSC visible by the
deployment of GOSC infrastructures with interdisciplinary showcases.
GOSC Initiative Overall Framework
So far, the CSTCloud federation has connected with some of her partners via EDUGAIN AAI
membership. An intercontinental testbed is under construction with three interdisciplinary show
chases selected for demonstration in the following years. Engagement in the ISC CODATA Decadal
Program and the GO-FAIR activities shall help the co-design of the policy framework to tackle
possible legal barriers towards GOSC implementation.
The existing open science cloud/platforms around the world include but not limited to the
followings:
-
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and other European Open Science Initiatives, such as
OpenAIR, etc.
-
African Open Science Platform (AOSP), and other pan-African research collaborations
including
SKA, H3Africa
-
New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization (NDRIO) and Research Data Canada
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National Research Infrastructure for Australia (ARDC)
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Malaysian Open Science Cloud
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RedCLAra and LA Referencia in Latin America
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NIH Data Commons, xsede and other initiatives such as the call for National Research Cloud
in the USA
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COS(Center for Open Science), Open Science Data Cloud
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CONOSC (https://conosc.org/)