The Photon and Neutron Open Science Cloud (PaNOSC) is a joint undertaking of photon and neutron sources on the ESFRI roadmap to make data preservation, sharing and re-use a reality and to link to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Data management according to the FAIR principles will benefit both the scientific community at large by making petabytes of data accessible and re-usable, and the research institutes and their users by providing services to reduce, analyse and publish their data.
PaNOSC is one of five science cluster projects supported by the INFRAEOSC-04 call. The partners joining their forces in the PaNOSC project are ESRF (synchrotron), ILL (neutron source), EuXFEL (free electron laser), ELI-DC (multi-site optical laser sources), ESS (neutron source) together with the ERIC CERIC-ERIC (3 photon and neutron sources), and e-infrastructures EGI (partner) and GÉANT (contributor). The participating RIs have very different levels of maturity, ranging from operational and currently upgraded facilities (ESRF, ILL), recently put into operation (CERIC-ERIC, EuXFEL), just starting up (ELI), to still under construction (ESS). PaNOSC will share best practices and expertise to bring all partner sites rapidly up to the same level of FAIR data management.
The five key objectives of the project are as follows:
1. Link the participating Research Infrastructures (RIs) to the EOSC by exposing data, providing services, and promoting its use by the scientific community. Technically this involves persistent identity management, access to compute and storage, data transfer and archival. Organisationally it implies a common approach between research infrastructures and provision of an efficient and competent user service.
2. Make scientific data produced at Europe’s major Photon and Neutron sources fully compatible with the FAIR principles by adopting a harmonised data policy and by adding rich and meaningful metadata to the experimental data generated in the RIs. All publicly funded data generated in the RIs will be made open (after an embargo period) and downloadable in accordance with the data policies adopted at the facilities.
3. Provide innovative data services to the users of these facilities locally and to the scientific community at large with the EOSC. Remote data reduction and analysis services will be implemented to help scientists interacting with data sets of variable size.
4. Increase the impact of RIs by ensuring data from user experiments can be used beyond the initial scope. Exposing data to the EOSC will allow combining data sets from different laboratories, cross domain and cross disciplinary.
5. Share the outcomes with the national RIs who are observers in the proposal and the scientific community to promote the adoption of FAIR data principles, data stewardship and uptake of the EOSC. The outcome of the work undertaken in PaNOSC will be shared with and promoted in the entire photon and neutron community and beyond.
