STFC computer scientist helps lead European open data project

28 Nov 2018 12:57 PM

A member of STFC has been elected to the executive board of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a project aiming to make all data produced by publically-funded research available to everyone.

EOSC officially launched on Friday and announced that Dr ​​​Juan Bicarregui, Head of the Data Division in STFC’s Scientific Computing Department, has been elected to become one of the 11 executive board members.

EOSC’s mission is to offer researchers and businesses across Europe a virtual environment to store, manage and analyse data. To do this, EOSC must bring together the different scientific data infrastructures from different research disciplines across the continent.

As well as technical challenges, it will be necessary to make changes to research culture so that anyone can access data produced by publically-funded research – making science more open and so more productive. 

Dr Bicarregui said: “I’m really pleased to be chosen to serve on the Executive Board for European Open Science Cloud.

“The Board will oversee development of the EOSC over the next two years, bringing together the outputs from several projects to provide a flexible environment supporting researchers’ needs for access to data and compute services.”

Dr Bicarregui was elected by and represents the Research Data Alliance. He added: “I’m on the Board as a representative of RDA. RDA is a global forum aiming to build the social and technical bridges to enable open sharing and re-use of data."

“By adopting RDA recommendations in developing the EOSC, we will ensure that the EOSC brings together not only infrastructures for research in Europe, but also across the globe.”

Two other Britons will also join Dr Bicarregui on the executive board, Sarah Jones, Associate Director from the Digital Curation Centre and Professor John Womersley, Director General of the European Spallation Source.