Data Repositories and Science Gateways for Open Science

The steep decrease of costs of large/huge-bandwidth Wide Area Networks has fostered in the recent
years the spread and the uptake of the Grid Computing paradigm and the distributed computing
ecosystem has become even more complex with the recent emergence of Cloud Computing.
All these developments have triggered the new concept of e-Infrastructures which are being built
since several years both in Europe and the rest of the world to support diverse multi-/interdisciplinary
Virtual Research Communities (VRCs) and their Virtual Research Environments
(VREs).
E-Infrastructure components can indeed be key platforms to support the Scientific Method, the
“knowledge path” followed every day by scientists since Galileo Galilei. Distributed Computing
and Storage Infrastructures (local High Performance/Throughput Computing resources, Grids,
Clouds, long term data preservation services) are ideal both for the creation of new datasets and the
analysis of existing ones while Data Infrastructures (including Open Access Document Repositories
– OADRs – and Data Repositories – DRs) are essential also to evaluate existing data and annotate
them with results of the analysis of new data produced by experiments and/or simulations. Last but
not least, Semantic Web based enrichment of data is key to correlate document and data, allowing
scientists to discover new knowledge in an easy way.
However, although big efforts are being done in the last years, both at technological and political
level, Open Access and Open Education are still far from being pervasive and ubiquitous and
prevent Open Science to be fully established. One of the main drawbacks of this situation is the
limiting effect it has on the reproducibility and extensibility of science outputs which are, since
more than four centuries, two fundamental pillars of the Scientific Method.
In this contribution we present the Open Access Repository (OAR), a pilot data preservation
repository of INFN and other Italian Research Organisations’ products (publications, software, data,
etc.) meant to serve both researchers and citizen scientists and to be interoperable with other related
initiatives both in Italy and abroad. OAR is powered by the INVENIO software and is both an Open
Access Initiative conforming and an official OpenDOAR data provider, able to automatically
harvest resources from different sources, including the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access
Publishing in Particle Physics (SCOAP3), using RESTful API?s. It is also one of the official
OpenAIRE archives, compliant with version 3.0 of its guidelines.
OAR allows SAML-based federated authentication and it is one of the Service Providers of the
eduGAIN inter-federation; it is also connected to DataCite for the issuance and registration of
Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs).
But what makes OAR really different from other repositories is its capability to connect to Science
Gateways and exploit Distributed Computing and Storage Infrastructures worldwide, including EGI
and EUDAT ones, to easily reproduce and extend scientific analyses. In this presentation concrete
examples related to the data of some High Energy Physics experiments at CERN.