The Photon and Neutron (PaN) Research Infrastructures (RIs) across Europe play an important role in scientific research, helping scientists from a wide variety of different disciplines gain a deeper insight into major questions for their respective fields.
The wider aim being to ultimately aid solving 21st century global challenges by accelerating scientific progress with the encouragement of data sharing through the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and making data widely available to help scientific progress.
Besides providing support to achieve those goals, it is essential for ExPaNDS to closely involve key audiences in this process. As different groups of the PaN community have different interests and consequently need different treatment, we created a stakeholder map allowing us to target different groups individually.
To communicate the importance of FAIR data handling and our involvement in the EOSC we interviewed key decision makers and senior management from our community, allowing us to make their statements available.
We can now create solutions these days and in the future even more so – atom by atom, you know materials which can be used for fighting climate change and fighting also diseases. But this data, this information is coming with a huge avalanche of data to us and we need concepts how to turn this data in to useful information and to knowledge.
It needs the right people; it needs the right infrastructure, and it needs financial resources. But I only can say now that knowledge is expensive, but ignorance we cannot afford.
Professor Dr Helmut Dosch, Chairman of the Board of Directors for DESY
What we have to develop in the user community, is the feeling that whatever you are doing with your experiment, you are doing that because it is open to everybody.
It is not just your experiment, it’s what you are doing with what you get from the funding agency, what you get together with your colleagues and this you have to transfer to the society. You are one of the steps of this process.
Dr. Caterina Biscari, CEO at ALBA Synchrotron
To get optimum value out of having open data and a consistent approach to having data we need to be inclusive, we need to actually involve as many different facilities and research establishments as possible and that is a really big coordination job.
What the ExPaNDS and PaNOSC grants provided is an excellent basis for continuing this work on open data and being able to share data. They set a really very clear direction for how we can develop this further and really great opportunities then to build on what has been achieved. This is a big endeavour, and that support has been critically important, but the next step is also vitally important.
Professor Roger Ecclestone, Director at ISIS Neutron and Muon Source
We are increasingly seeing in some communities, the recognition that by sharing the data on an appropriate timescale, ideally as soon as possible, there are some real benefits to be had. So, I think the challenge, the cultural challenge is to demonstrate to the science community at large that actually the benefits greatly overwhelm the risks.
Professor Andrew Harrison, former CEO at Diamond Light Source