Tautvydas Kiršys

The current version of the EOSC rules of participation report edited by the EOSC Executive Board Rules of Participation (RoP) Working Group (WG) states the standards and conduct required of EOSC participants.

The rules themselves are high level in order to be generally applicable and longlived. However, the lack of details and specific compliance criteria can make it difficult for providers to understand all the needed requirements, if they have no legal background or experience, which is not unusual in many companies, especially SMEs. Moreover, openness, transparency, and inclusiveness are among the key principles that have been defined by RoP. Ensuring these principles can be a particularly demanding task when dealing with legal and ethics aspects. Therefore, a self-assessment tool, which can help EOSC service providers understand the main priorities of EOSC RoP and the actions they have to undertake to be compliant with the core principles of the RoP, is needed.

The solution proposed to adress the mentioned challenge is a tool called RoLECT. It was developed by Athena Research & Innovation Center, whose aim is to build knowledge and devise solutions and technologies for the digital society. The company is one of the NI4OS-Europe partners and a member of the EOSC Association

Based on NI4OS-Europe’s research, legal uncertainty about usage rights and high costs in clearance of licensing issues are very often a matter of concern when it comes to newly produced content but mostly the creation of derivative works, i.e. work that is produced based on other sources. Before sharing one’s research it is important to correctly clear copyrights for any material that may have been used.

The Licence Clearance Tool (LCT) automates the licence clearance of derivative works and the selection of the most suitable licence for the users’ resources. The tool provides a guided approach for establishing the proper open-source license required for the creation of a new (or synthetic) dataset, media, software etc. or for the re-use of existing unlicensed content. It proposes two workflows, one resource-driven for users that have a resource and want to clear derivate work licenses; the other is license-driven and it can be used when users have a target license and need to understand license compatibility with other resources.

The Social Sciences and Humanities communities needed a central point to gather and exchange information about their tools, services, and datasets. Although plenty of project websites, service registries, and data repositories existed, they were mostly fragmented. The lack of contextualisation connecting these assets and offering domain-relevant means to discuss and enrich them was evident. Also, there was a need to digitalise this research domain which, in most cases, was not yet digital native.

This siloed environment was the challenge SSHOC set out to bridge in January 2019.

The  solution to solve this problems was found in the SSH Open Marketplace, delivered in 2022. It is a discovery platform supporting researchers in the multi-faceted domain of humanities and social sciences at every step of the research data lifecycle.

The SSH Open Marketplace is available on the EOSC Portal and was developed by SSHOC

While collecting data for the NI4OS-Europe landscape survey, it was possible to observe that a significant number of repositories from the partner countries were not registered with OpenDOAR and other registries and aggregators. The number of those lacking clear repository policies, not providing interoperability or addressing the policies incorrectly, was even greater. To be considered trustworthy, a repository should have a transparent policy, informing users about the roles, responsibilities, rights and procedures aimed at ensuring that deposited data are preserved and disseminated in line with the FAIR principles.
Policies are also required in the process of onboarding platforms and services into NI4OS-Europe, OpenAIRE and EOSC.

To address this challenge NI4OS-Europe developed the Repository Policy Generator (RePol), an opensource
web application that facilitates the process of drafting repository policies. RePol is available on NI4OS- Europe service catalogue, a regional catalogue through which all the project’s services are onboarded to EOSC

Recent extreme droughts combined with accelerating human exploitation are pushing tropical forests to the point where they cannot recover, making them vulnerable to large unprecedented wildfires. This causes an urgent need to monitor the recovery capacity of tropical forests.

While time series-based break detection approaches have demonstrated potential to measure tropical forest recovery capacity, they have not yet been applied over large amounts of satellite data.

To address this challenge, the SURF computing infrastructure, i.e., the SPIDER cluster and the Sentinel-1 data cube prepared by the EODC GmbH was used. Those resources were available within the C-SCALE project as a part of a use case defined and designed together with EOSC experts. The provided resources were extremely useful for the RETURN use case. This aims at exploring time series of satellite radar (Sentinel-1) images from the EU Copernicus Earth Observation (EO) Programme to understand the recovery capacity of the Amazon rainforest. The outcomes of the RETURN research are important to help identify areas with slower forest recovery in the Amazon basin and potentially understand their causes.

There are several research infrastructures or other data services running in Europe that cover a multitude of marine-related sciences, providing specific datasets coming from observations collected with different methods. These infrastructures constitute a diverse world, each looking at a piece of the big picture. Blue-Cloud aims to overcome fragmentation and create a bridge between thematic science clusters – such as humanities, climate, food and agriculture sciences – and EOSC, creating a data federation and providing a common access to a so-called thematic EOSC for marine data to enhance the visibility and discoverability of data from marine and environmental domains.

To overcome this fragmentation, a dedicated Data Discovery and Access Service has been implemented. This service facilitates discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products for external users in stand-alone mode, also interoperable with other Blue-Cloud services, such as the Virtual Research Environment. More than 10 million data sets are managed in blue data infrastructures (BDIs) that are connected to this Blue-Cloud service to serve federated discovery and access. A common interface is provided for discovery and retrieval of data sets and data products from each of the federated BDIs.

While collecting data for the NI4OS-Europe landscape survey, it was possible to observe that a significant number of repositories from the partner countries were not registered with OpenDOAR and other registries and aggregators. The number of those lacking clear repository policies, not providing interoperability or addressing the policies incorrectly, was even greater. To be considered trustworthy, a repository should have a transparent policy, informing users about the roles, responsibilities, rights and procedures aimed at ensuring that deposited data are preserved and disseminated in line with the FAIR principles.
Policies are also required in the process of onboarding platforms and services into NI4OS-Europe, OpenAIRE and EOSC.

To address this challenge NI4OS-Europe developed the Repository Policy Generator (RePol), an opensource
web application that facilitates the process of drafting repository policies. RePol is available on NI4OS- Europe service catalogue, a regional catalogue through which all the project’s services are onboarded to EOSC