Addressing the challenges of making data, products, and services accessible: an EPOS perspective

Climate change, volcanic eruptions, pandemics, financial crises, or large earthquakes; the problems societies must deal with nowadays are often complex and multifaceted. In a data-driven world, providing access to comprehensive, multidisciplinary data repositories to tackle such wicked problems is indispensable. Frameworks allowing such data access are therefore of particular importance. EPOS, the European research infrastructure for the solid Earth domain, is such a framework. It is a multidisciplinary, distributed research infrastructure that facilitates the integrated use of data, data products and services, and facilities from the European solid Earth science community. Although the importance of this undertaking is obvious, its implementation bears many challenges. We focus in our contribution at the most pressing issues from when data, products, and services are made accessible, to access principles, ethical issues related to its collection and use as well as with respect to their promotion.