The International Symposium on Open Science Cloud (ISOSC) 2023 will take place on 4-6 September 2023 in Beijing China, and the CONFERENCE HANDBOOK is available.
Background
The major global human and societal challenges of our time call for broader cooperation based on the transparent, FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable), and intelligent linking of multiple research resources following the Open Science research paradigm. The benefits of such an approach, even partially realised, and the difficulties caused by a lack of FAIR (meta) data have been amply demonstrated in such current challenges as tackling the pandemic, achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), as well as other global governance activities in the 21st century. Among all components of Open Science, large-scale data processing and exchange ignite more possibilities for scientific discovery but come with considerable additional costs. The Open Science Cloud approach offers economies of scale by providing large-scale cloud services based on federated resources across borders, also facilitating larger-scale data aggregation and analysis. Typical examples include the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the China Science and Technology Cloud (CSTCloud), the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), the African Open Science Platform (AOSP), and other international open science commons initiatives.
During the 2019 CODATA Conference in Beijing, experts from around the world discussed and proposed the idea of co-designing and co-building an interconnected Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC). The objective of the GOSC initiative is to encourage cooperation, alignment, and ultimately interoperability among Open Science/Research Clouds/Platforms. We aim to help connect various institutional, national, and regional initiatives, laying the foundations for cross-continental, federated, Open Science and FAIR infrastructure, and virtual research environments. The ultimate vision is of a global Open Science environment that connects trusted research e-Infrastructures to enable innovative scientific discovery. The GOSC initiative is currently promoting collaboration among partners, developing a GOSC testbed, and exploring domain and cross-domain exemplars.
A series of discussions and activities are underway, including the GOSC panel and GOSC parallel session during the International FAIR Convergence Symposium 2020, GOSC sessions in the SciDataCon 2021 and International Data Week 2022, the joint GOSC workshops (1st workshop, 2nd workshop, 3rd workshop) co-organised by the European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), Committee on Data of the International Science Council (CODATA), and Computer Network Information Center, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC, CAS), GOSC All Hands Meetings (1st & 2nd), the launch event of the GOSC International Programme Office (GOSC IPO). Additionally, related discussions in the Global Open Research Commons Interest Group (GORC IG) and its Benchmarking Working Group (WG) supported by the Research Data Alliance (RDA) are ongoing.