Photon and Neutron sources are some of the most advanced scientific infrastructures on the planet. For example the light coming from a beam at a synchrotron is a million times brighter than our sun. These facilities are used to generate scientific results that drive society forward. But to do this, they need to generate a lot of data.
With the ExPaNDS project, we started to make this data accessible through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) so that its potential can be fully explored and exploited by scientists and the public alike. In this age of data-driven science, this is an important step to accelerating new advances in science from European Photon and Neutron Research Infrastructures.
ExPaNDS is a collaboration between 10 national Photon and Neutron sources located in Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden. Our 11th partner EGI is our link to the EOSC and its underlying cloud infrastructure.
As a thematic project of the INFRAEOSC-05 funding call, we are directly reaching our users and instrument scientists to make the data produced at our facilities “FAIR” - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable - so that they can be preserved and serve as many purposes as possible.
To help scientists transform this data into knowledge, we applied state-of-the-art technologies to existing data analysis services, making them cloud-ready and infrastructure-agnostic. This makes our users' lives easier, enabling them to access their analysis software wherever they need them: at their home institute, at any other PaN facility or in the EOSC.
Tutorials on the use of data analysis, on data policies, ontologies for experimental techniques and community file formats are published in the PaN-training.eu platform, significantly enhancing reusability and more generally fostering open science at Photon and Neutron sources in Europe.
