Building an EOSC based virtual research environment to support the adoption of FAIR and Open Science practices in Climate Change Adaptation communities

During the last years, Open Science has been gaining increasing attention from research communities and policy makers because of the benefits it can provide not only to scientists, but also to society in general, as it can accelerate the production of science and the quality of results. Open science is a policy priority for the European Commission (EC) and the standard method of working under its research and innovation funding programmes. Thus, the EC initiated the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative, which aims to create a virtual environment for sharing and accessing research data across borders and scientific disciplines, aligning with Open Science and FAIR principles. EOSC specified a layered approach with a set of core services at its center, a federated data layer, a rich set of exchange services to expand the capabilities offered to researchers across disciplines, plus a set of thematic/discipline-specific services. To fully realise EOSC’s vision, it is envisioned as a federation of distributed systems, combined into a system of systems, consisting of multiple Nodes’. At the end of last year, the first of such nodes (EOSC EU node) was launched featuring the core services enabling scientific research infrastructures to federate and a set of common exchange “horizontal services” for end-users to benefit from. 

Based on the integration of thematic, horizontal, and core resources, the goal is that EOSC enables the creation of thematic execution environments/VREs. A VRE is an online support system for researchers,  encompassing online tools, network resources and technologies interoperating with each other to ease/enhance the research process within and across institutional boundaries, facilitating collaboration, data management, analysis, and other research-related activities in one online space.

To build an EOSC-based VRE, we have leveraged and integrated different core and exchange services. At the center of the proposed VRE are RO-Crate based research objects (providing an implementation of the FAIR digital object), as well as the associated technological support (provided by ROHub platform), to manage the research lifecycle and the associated scientific resources used and produced. The VRE leverages data cubes services for efficient and scalable structured data access and discovery, AI-based text mining services  that extract machine-readable metadata from scientific resources supporting recommendations and comprehension analysis, and FAIR assessment tools supporting researchers in the FAIRification of their outcomes. Additionally, the VRE relies on EOSC services for authentication and authorization to enable seamless access to different services, the computing platforms to execute computational methods, and data repositories to store and/or share their data in their personal/community workspaces or general repositories. The VRE also connects DMP platforms to enable the creation of machine-actionable plans, and with the scientific knowledge graph to enable the discovery of resources by different communities. In the FAIR2Adapt project, such environment is being enhanced with a set of added-value services (e.g., search and discovery using NL questions, multilingual semantic enrichment, sentence detection, FAIRness-aware search and recommendations, and multilingual generative question answering) and adapted to boost FAIR adoption in Climate Change Adaptation communities and research.