Towards the European Open Science Cloud: Main Outcomes of the Helix Nebula Initiative Open Day Event
The big data bang in life science research -- The rise of big data in areas such as genomics or large-scale imaging offers many scientific opportunities. However, it also poses enormous new challenges around storage, access and analysis of life science research data. Over a million estimated genome datasets from cancer patients will become available to the life science community by 2019. This will be a big step forward creating enormous opportunities for cancer research. However, no single European research centre will be able to provide the necessary infrastructure to analyse the hundreds of thousands of genomes, to store and access them securely or to utilize these data efficiently for translational research and downstream medical application. The European Open Science Cloud seen from a life science perspective -- So how do we deal with this issue? Well, one answer is the creation of a European Open Science Cloud. Representatives from EMBL, the U.S. National Health Institute, the ESFRI projects Euro-BioImaging and ELIXIR, the global Pan-Cancer project discussed their vision for a science cloud and recommended the following: - Research communities need usable services for open science - Users should be in the driving seat with the ability to influence funding - Incentives for data generators should be created to store data on the science cloud - Research infrastructures need more cost-effective approaches to aggregating, processing, openly sharing and re-using the rapidly growing amounts of data they produce - Cloud-based community repositories e.g. cancer genomes or large-scale image datasets could solve many of the key challenges mentioned - Federated clouds across different centres and European countries can help solving scalability issues - Procuring cloud resources is a cost-effective way of ensuring capacity on-demand Delegates agree that mature open source technologies exist today, however, integration, policy and governance still require careful attention. That’s where the European Open Science Cloud can make the difference. Science as an open, collaborative and participative process - The European Open Science Cloud is not just a single solution, but a trusted and open environment for storing, sharing and re-using scientific data and results supporting Open Science practices. For the European Open Science Cloud to be effective delegates concluded it must be user-driven and cost-effective, enable cross-domain interactions to foster scientific innovation, bring together existing and emerging data/e-infrastructures, engage the private sector as a data/service user and service provider as key to sustainability, instill trust in data owners by ensuring they keep control of their data, have a light governance with agile provisioning models and promote public-private innovation to satisfy the needs of the research communities and increase the global competitiveness of European ICT providers. A major step towards the European Open Science Cloud: the first joint cloud services procurement by European publicly funded research -- Several initiatives within the European panorama already work on building the foundations for the European Open Science Cloud. HNSciCloud is one of the key initiatives, representing a new pre-commercial procurement project co-funded by the European Commission Horizon 2020 Programme and ten public research organisations. HNSciCloud builds on the results of the PICSE project on cloud procurement and aims to create a competitive marketplace of innovative cloud services to serve scientific users from a wide range of domains. To achieve these objectives HNSciCloud will issue a public tender in 2016 (http://ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NOTICE:19573-2016:TEXT:EN:HTML). A video stream and all the presentations of the open day event are available at http://ow.ly/YEBYA. Share your additional thoughts with us @HelixNebulaSC, @PICSEPROCURE or @EMBLorg For more infromation www.helix-nebula.eu
Keywords
Pre-Commercial Procurement, open tender, market consultation, innovative cloud services, European Open Science Cloud, Helix Nebula Initiative
Countries
Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Switzerland, Czechia, Germany, Denmark, Estonia, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Croatia, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Slovenia, Slovakia, United Kingdom