The project aims to publish and map the data behind the thousands of successful published scientific papers generated by Europe's Photon and Neutron Research Infrastructures (PaN RIs) – which every year create petabytes of data – and make it available to all.

Professor Volker Gülzow, IT Director at DESY, explained during the kick-off meeting in September 2019: “There is a wealth of data behind all the scientific papers that are published each year. However, it is increasingly difficult to get access to all this valuable information. We propose to make this data accessible through the European Open Science Cloud so that its potential benefits 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 infrastructure."

The project brings together a network of ten national PaN RIs from across Europe, as well as EGI, a federated e-Infrastructure set up to provide advanced computing services for research. It will deliver added-value data science services through the EOSC framework. The EOSC currently provides a range of services that fit the ever-increasing needs of scientific experiments held at various PaN RIs across Europe. These needs are driven by modern detector technology that delivers very high data rates for individual experiments.

Prof. Helmut Dosch, Chair of the League of European Accelerator-based Photon Sources (LEAPS) and Director of DESY in Hamburg, added: "According to data from LEAPS, these user communities now have over 23,400 unique articles published in peer-reviewed journals, and more than 24,000 direct users. With the addition of the neutron community, these numbers increase further. Users expect high-quality data analysis services from our respective Research Infrastructures (RIs), and want services to be standardised, interoperable, and integrated, as time on instruments is often granted to users at different RIs. This new collaboration, supported by the European Commission, forms a strategic positioning to help LEAPS move towards greater unification of our facilities to the benefit of the scientific community."

The primary goal of ExPaNDS – the harmonisation of metadata, interoperability of services, and standardisation – has become of the utmost importance. This not only simplifies and improves the user experience, but also opens up access to new groups of academic and industrial users, with little or no previous experience in these fields. A distributed but federated cloud-based environment would also allow for harmonised access and, more importantly, easy data sharing. ExPaNDS members will collaboratively strive to realise the EU’s Fifth Freedom: to create the free movement of knowledge, equipping members to better engage with new initiatives.

About ExPaNDS

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Photon and Neutron Data Service (ExPaNDS) project will expand, accelerate and support the data management and data services provided through the EOSC for major national Photon and Neutron Research Infrastructures (PaN RIs) in delivering world-leading science. 

It is an ambitious project which will create enormous opportunities for the scientific community and through their findings for humankind across the globe. This will be achieved through the collaboration and federation of 10 national PaN RIs from across Europe based on EOSC services, and will become a game-changer for the scientific user community. 

ExPaNDS will make the majority of PaN RIs data ‘open’ following the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) according to the user’s needs, and to harmonise efforts to migrate facility's data analysis workflows to EOSC platforms enabling them to be shared in a uniform way.

Beneficiaries for the grant include:

• Stiftung Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (DESY)

• Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI)

• Diamond Light Source Limited (Diamond)

• United Kingdom Research and Innovation (UKRI)

• Synchrotron SOLEIL Société Civile (SOLEIL)

• Stichting EGI

• ALBA Synchrotron

• Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH (HZB)

• Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf e.V. (HZDR)

• Lunds Universitet (MAX IV)

• ELETTRA – Sincrotrone Trieste S.c.p.A.