Europe joins forces to create largest ever shared data repository for researchers

The idea is to give every scientific user access to the data resulting from research carried out with public funding, using a single login.

According to Professor Iain Mattaj, head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, Germany, the cloud-based service could facilitate the sort of interdisciplinary collaboration that has transformed our present understanding of the earth’s climate and the human genome.

By 2020, it could grant the science community direct and easy access to scientific data generated by publicly funded research, and used for scientific publication.

Broad agreement on the go-ahead came during the European Open Science Cloud Summit in Brussels, Belgium, on 12 June.

Carlos Moedas, the European Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation, described the European Open Science Cloud as a one-stop shop for scientists to pool their observations, and as a commons for European science.

‘I see it as a new Republic of Letters,’ he said, referring to the correspondence between intellectuals during the Age of Enlightenment.

The platform could save time on unnecessary duplication of experiments and grant even small research groups access to vast data samples.

This unprecedented pooling of research data from across scientific disciplines and national borders takes to a new level the open research data repositories that have supported scientific collaboration since the early days of the internet.

No one is underestimating the scale of the challenges to be faced in making the European Open Science Cloud work.

‘We are talking about a staggering amount of data,’ said Dr Harald Reichert from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in Grenoble, France.

His institute alone records petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of measurements each month – enough to drown even Facebook’s servers over just a couple of years.

Making this volume of research data accessible to 1.7 million researchers across Europe requires vast amounts of bandwidth, funding and work, he said.

Professor John Womersley from the European Spallation Source super microscope in Lund, Sweden, insisted that storing data is not enough.