Perspectives on the Implementation of FAIR Principles in Solid Earth Research Infrastructures

<p>Interoperability has long been an objective for research infrastructures dealing with research data to foster open access and open science. More recently, FAIR principles (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) have been proposed. The FAIR principles are now reference criteria for promoting and evaluating openness of scientific data. FAIRness is considered a necessary target for research infrastructures in different scientific domains at European and global level.</p><p>Solid Earth RIs have long been committed to engage scientific communities involved in data collection, standardization and quality management as well as providing metadata and services for qualification, storage and accessibility. They are working to adopt FAIR principles, thus addressing the onerous task of turning these principles into practices. To make FAIR principles a reality in terms of service provision for data stewardship, some RI implementers in EPOS have proposed a FAIR-adoption process leveraging a four stage roadmap that reorganizes FAIR principles to better fit to scientists and RI implementers mindset. The roadmap considers FAIR principles as requirements in the software development life cycle, and reorganizes them into data, metadata, access services and use services. Both the implementation and the assessment of “FAIRness” level by means of questionnaire and metrics is made simple and closer to day-to-day scientists works.</p><p>FAIR data and service management is demanding, requiring resources and skills and more importantly it needs sustainable IT resources. For this reason, FAIR data management is challenging for many Research Infrastructures and data providers turning FAIR principles into reality through viable and sustainable practices. FAIR data management also includes implementing services to access data as well as to visualize, process, analyse and model them for generating new scientific products and discoveries.</p><p>FAIR data management is challenging to Earth scientists because it depends on their perception of finding, accessing and using data and scientific products: in other words, the perception of data sharing. The sustainability of FAIR data and service management is not limited to financial sustainability and funding; rather, it also includes legal, governance and technical issues that concern the scientific communities.</p><p>In this contribution, we present and discuss some of the main challenges that need to be urgently tackled in order to run and operate FAIR data services in the long-term, as also envisaged by the European Open Science Cloud initiative: a) sustainability of the IT solutions and resources to support practices for FAIR data management (i.e., PID usage and preservation, including costs for operating the associated IT services); b) re-usability, which on one hand requires clear and tested methods to manage heterogeneous metadata and provenance, while on the other hand can be considered a frontier research field; c) FAIR services provision, which presents many open questions related to the application of FAIR principles to services for data stewardship, and to services for the creation of data products taking in input FAIR raw data, for which is not clear how FAIRness compliancy of data products can be still guaranteed.</p>

Addressing global environmental and societal challenges requires robust, interdisciplinary data ecosystems that support collaboration across geographic, cultural, and disciplinary boundaries. AuScope, Australia’s National Research Infrastructure (NRI) provider for the geoscience community, collaboratively tackles interdisciplinary grand challenges such as climate change, natural resource security, and natural hazards. AuScope is funded by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) and integrates tools, data, analytics, and services across Australian research and government agencies, in particular, partnering with organisations at the forefront of research data systems and infrastructure.Through collaborations with CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, state and territory geological surveys, universities, and other NCRIS facilities, including the National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), the Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network (TERN), and the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), AuScope is addressing the complexities of modern FAIR data management at scales ranging from small scale local installations to co-located High Performance Compute and Data (HPCD) Platforms. Key AuScope initiatives such as Geophysics 2030 Collections (https://ardc.edu.au/project/2030-geophysics-collections/), AusGeochem (https://ausgeochem.auscope.org.au/), the Modelling Atlas of The Earth (M@TE; https://mate.science), and the AuScope Data Repository (https://repository.data.auscope.org.au/) exemplify how the FAIR principles can be operationalised to support impactful research both within and beyond the geosciences and at multiple scales.Nationally, AuScope collaborates with other Earth and Environmental Research Infrastructure providers, working to transform Australia’s research capabilities through, for example, Coastal Research Infrastructure (CoastRI) and implementing the National Digital Research Infrastructure Strategy (NDRI). Globally, AuScope contributes to initiatives like OneGeochemistry, the CODATA-led WorldFAIR Plus project, EarthScope (US), EPOS, Geo-INQUIRE, and ChEESE (Europe), ensuring compatibility with international research infrastructures, data standards, and best practices while at the same time, aligning with Australia’s geoscience priorities. This presentation will highlight how AuScope is progressively operationalising the FAIR and TRUST principles across its investments by focusing on place-based research to foster interoperability, strategic collaboration, and Open Science practices. By aligning with the CARE principles as well as advancing collaborative data infrastructure, AuScope creates trusted, interoperable data ecosystems that empower researchers to effectively and efficiently address pressing interdisciplinary societal challenges at both a national and international scale.

The topic of data storage, traceability, and data use and reuse in the years following experiments is becoming an important topic in Europe and across the world. Many scientific communities are striving to create open data by the FAIR principles. This is a requirement from the European Commission for EU-funded projects and experiments at EU-funded research infrastructures (RIs) and from many national funding agencies. This is challenging for users of large-scale RIs such as neutron, photon, synchrotron and free-electron laser facilities. Users of photon and neutron (PaN) RIs employ a wide range of scattering, imaging and spectroscopic methods investigating the behaviour of matter with a broad scientific base across physics, chemistry and biology, including engineering, environmental, cultural heritage and medical applications. They produce large data volumes of up to 1 PByte per day in some cases. To ensure all these data are FAIR requires an enormous effort from PaN RIs. It requires not only the expansion of data storage capacity, but also the development and deployment of software for effective data storage, metadata schemes and implementation of effective data pipelines at each individual experiment across RIs. FAIR data also affect the carbon footprint related to large amounts of data and raise questions related to user authentication, rights of access and cyber security. The RIs alone cannot achieve such a transformational process. For successful open science, cooperation of the user communities is essential as they need to create and utilize existing tools to deliver FAIR data. In this white paper, the European PaN community outline and discuss the role and responsibilities of the users and RIs and their common accountability to achieve FAIR data. This paper shall serve as a starting point for a common user and RI approach on the European scale to achieve FAIR data.

The EPOS-Norway – Research Infrastructure for Geohazards (EPOS-NG) will be established, starting from spring 2025, with funding from the Research Council of Norway’s Infrastructure program. EPOS-NG aims to be the go-to infrastructure for research on geohazards in Norway (i.e., landslides, tsunamis, earthquakes, and cryospheric hazards). Complementary to EPOS ERIC and building on research infrastructure developed during EPOS-Norway (EPOS-N) phase 1, EPOS-NG will establish new pools of instruments that are easily accessible to all geoscientists in Norway. We will develop an enhanced and extended state-of-the-art data portal to provide nationwide access to a range of geoscience data as well as computational and visualisation services. The EPOS-NG instrument pools include rapid-deployable seismometers, ocean bottom seismographs, Distributed Acoustic Sensing and Distributed Temperature and Strain Sensing instrumentation, Transient Electromagnetic measurement capacity, piezometers, self-potential sensors and ground-based interferometric radar systems. The new instruments will facilitate research on a wide range of processes including seismicity, slope stability and landslides, groundwater and soil conditions, permafrost and cryospheric processes. Combined with new services for tsunami hazard assessment, as well as novel datasets on InSAR displacement trends and historical and palaeoseismological events, new links can be established through comprehensive, multidisciplinary studies. Effective data integration and visualisation will be achieved via the EPOS-N portal, which was developed in EPOS-N phase 1 and will be substantially enhanced in close dialogue with the users in EPOS-NG. The portal combines data from distributed monitoring networks, innovative services for advanced data analysis and national databases within geosciences into a single national e-infrastructure, following FAIR principles. EPOS-NG thus represents a unifying nationwide research infrastructure, including all the relevant physical infrastructures and providing a national hub for solid Earth science data and services.

Bioimage data are generated in diverse research fields throughout the life and biomedical sciences. Its potential for advancing scientific progress via modern, data-driven discovery approaches reaches beyond disciplinary borders. To fully exploit this potential, it is necessary to make bioimaging data, in general, multidimensional microscopy images and image series, FAIR, that is, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. These FAIR principles for research data management are now widely accepted in the scientific community and have been adopted by funding agencies, policymakers and publishers. To remain competitive and at the forefront of research, implementing the FAIR principles into daily routines is an essential but challenging task for researchers and research infrastructures. Imaging core facilities, well-established providers of access to imaging equipment and expertise, are in an excellent position to lead this transformation in bioimaging research data management. They are positioned at the intersection of research groups, IT infrastructure providers, the institution´s administration, and microscope vendors. In the frame of German BioImaging - Society for Microscopy and Image Analysis (GerBI-GMB), cross-institutional working groups and third-party funded projects were initiated in recent years to advance the bioimaging community's capability and capacity for FAIR bioimage data management. Here, we provide an imaging-core-facility-centric perspective outlining the experience and current strategies in Germany to facilitate the practical adoption of the FAIR principles closely aligned with the international bioimaging community. We highlight which tools and services are ready to be implemented and what the future directions for FAIR bioimage data have to offer.

The digital era has brought about an impressive increase in the volume of published species occurrence data. Research infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the digitization of legacy data, and the use of mobile applications have all played a role in this transition. More data implies, unavoidably, more heterogeneity at multiple levels as a result of the different methods and standards used to collect data. Data standardization and aggregation help to reduce this heterogeneity. Furthermore, intermediate data products that can be used for activities such as mapping, modeling and monitoring improve the repeatability and reproducibility of biodiversity research (Kissling et al. 2017). Occurrences can be defined as events in a three-dimensional space where the dimensions are taxonomic (what), temporal (when) and spatial (where). They are then aggregated into what we coined occurrence cube (Fig. 1). The taxonomic dimension is categorical. Research infrastructures like GBIF use a taxonomic backbone, thus making data aggregation at species level or higher rank relatively easy. The temporal dimension is a continuum and the temporal uncertainty is usually lower than the typical aggregation span, typically a year. Regarding the spatial dimension, occurrences are typically filtered to remove those with too large an uncertainty to fit the grid scheme being used. Meaning that the spatial uncertainty is largely unused. We developed a method to take into account this spatial uncertainty while aggregating data. In particular, we state that an occurrence is spatially representable as a closed plane figure such as a circle, hexagon or square, never as the geometric centre (centroid) of it. As for GBIF occurrence data, the coordinateUncertaintyInMeters is defined as the radius describing the smallest circle containing the whole of the location (see Darwin Core standard). So, spatially speaking, we refer to occurrences as circles, even if the method described below is general. After harvesting the occurrence data and providing a data quality assessment (e.g. removing occurrences without coordinates or with suspicious coordinates) we can assign occurrences to a reference grid such as the European reference grid of the European Environment Agency (EEA) at 1 km scale. In this spatial aggregation we randomly choose a point within the occurrence circle and assign it to the grid cell in which it is contained. We can aggregate further by time (e.g. by year) and taxonomy (e.g. by species), where aggregating means counting how many occurrences are in each specific taxonomic-spatial-temporal unit. The analogy with geometry goes further: the occurrence cube can, as any cube, be projected on an orthogonal plane by aggregating along one of the three dimensions. In particular, projecting the cube on the taxonomic and temporal dimensions can be done by adding up the number of occurrences, or counting the number of occupied cells, thus estimating the area of occupancy. The occurrence cube paradigm has been developed within the Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS) project (Vanderhoeven et al. 2017) following Open Science and FAIR principles. We created and published occurrence cubes at the species level for Belgium and Italy (Oldoni et al. 2020b) and the occurrence cubes for non-native taxa in Belgium and Europe (Oldoni et al. 2020a).

In 2023, a team from a local grant-funded medical data repository requested guidance from Penn Libraries on evaluating the extent to which their repository was FAIR-enabling. After a consultation with the repository team, our research data experts discovered that many of the current self-assessments of the FAIR guidelines were for data creators rather than data repository managers. In addition, we wanted a self-assessment tool similar to the process and guidance created by CoreTrustSeal but focusing explicitly on the FAIR Principles. In answer to their request, the Penn Libraries Research Data Engineer conducted a literature review and coalesced current guidance and assessment tools on the principles. After this review of the existing documentation, a small team developed a FAIR Principles self-assessment tool for repository teams. In addition to several iterations of the tool, we also met with the repository team for feedback on making the tool more understandable. Our conversation provided insights into the challenges of explaining the FAIR Principles to those without information or data science backgrounds. The discussion and creation of this self-assessment tool helped develop a more transparent and trustworthy repository. This paper will discuss our process for developing the assessment, the goals for utilizing the tool, and the lessons learned. Reporting our findings as they currently stand will prompt the research data management field to ruminate on the adoption of FAIR Principles for data repositories. We also intend to encourage conversation on the usability of the FAIR Principles for professionals without an information or data science background.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) aims to integrate existing infrastructures in the solid earth sciences into a single infrastructure, enabling earth scientists across Europe to combine, model, and interpret multidisciplinary datasets at different time and length scales. In particular, a primary objective is to integrate existing research infrastructures within the fields of seismology, geodesy, geophysics, geology, rock physics, and volcanology at a pan-European level. The added value of such integration is not visible through individual analyses of data from each research infrastructure; it needs to be understood in a long-term perspective that includes the time when changes implied by current scientific research results are fully realized and their societal impacts have become clear. EPOS is now entering its implementation phase following a four-year preparatory phase during which 18 member countries in Europe contributed more than 250 research infrastructures to the building of this pan-European vision. The Arctic covers a significant portion of the European plate and therefore plays an important part in research on the solid earth in Europe. However, the work environment in the Arctic is challenging. First, most of the European Plate boundary in the Arctic is offshore, and hence, sub-sea networks must be built for solid earth observation. Second, ice covers the Arctic Ocean where the European Plate boundary crosses through the Gakkel Ridge, so innovative technologies are needed to monitor solid earth deformation. Therefore, research collaboration with other disciplines such as physical oceanography, marine acoustics, and geo-biology is necessary. The establishment of efficient research infrastructures suitable for these challenging conditions is essential both to reduce costs and to stimulate multidisciplinary research.

<p>IAGOS (In-service Aircraft for a Global Observing System) is a European Research Infrastructure that aims to provide long-term, regular and spatially resolved in situ observations of the atmospheric composition.  IAGOS observation systems are deployed on a fleet of commercial aircraft and perform uninterrupted measurements, from take-off to landing, of aerosols, cloud particles, greenhouse gases, ozone, carbon monoxide, water vapor and nitrogen oxides, from the surface to the lower stratosphere. The IAGOS database is an essential part of the global atmospheric monitoring network.</p><p>The IAGOS Data Portal (via https://www.iagos.org) is managed by AERIS, the French Data and Services Cluster for Atmosphere (https://en.aeris-data.fr). The new portal offers improved discovery and access to all the IAGOS datasets from the observational data to the derived and elaborated data products. Thanks to the H2020 project ENVRI-FAIR, all data is now managed in accordance with the FAIR principles. Rich metadata and data files are available in standardized formats (NetCDF-CF, etc.). The portal also provides advanced web-processing services such as visualisation capabilities and machine actionable access.</p><p>Particular attention has been paid to the interoperability of IAGOS data with external data portals. Interoperability is currently being implemented with other airborne programs such as SAFIRE and EUFAR, with other Research Infrastructures from the Atmospheric domain and more generally from the Environmental domain in the frame of the ENVRI community.</p><p>In the frame of the European projects ATMO-ACCESS and RI-URBANS, IAGOS is currently developing new advanced services such as: statistical analysis tools, combination of products from different sources with satellite data and models, Jupyter notebooks for demonstration of IAGOS data usage, footprints calculation and homeless data service for datasets acquired on mobile platforms.</p>

The integration of state-of-the-art fibre optic sensing technologies with telecommunication systems has not yet been achieved. There are many challenges which need to be overcome to allow for a pan-continental research instrument, all of which requires international collaboration. Such international collaborations would allow for the creation of novel applications and research into Earth science, such as cetology and abiotic and biotic marine interactions, oceanography, seismology, volcanology, and soundscape monitoring, to name but a few.Over the past 5 years, research teams from National seismic and oceanographic infrastructures, together with National Research and Education Networks (NRENs), and partners from universities, research institutes and industry have pioneered sensing techniques to use submarine optical telecommunication fibres to monitor the Earth and its systems.Fibre sensing technology and collaborations created by developing these techniques have now reached a level where a new paradigm shift can occur. This presentation will discuss the SUBMERSE project (SUBMarinE cables for ReSearch and Exploration), which is creating and delivering a pilot research instrument which could serve as a blueprint for continuous monitoring upon many more existing submarine fibre optic cables in the future.The SUBMERSE project, which started in May 2023, is a Horizon Europe-funded, 36-month long initiative which is investigating the combined acquisition of SOP (State-of-Polarisation) and DAS (Distributed Acoustic Sensing) data from live telecom cables, with the aim to then make that data available to researchers globally and F.A.I.R. The project team, consisting of 24 organisations, uses existing fibre-optic infrastructure deployed across multiple national research infrastructures to create a pan-European research instrument.Our presentation will discuss the latest field deployments of DAS and SOP technologies across 5 geographic locations on 3 cable systems, which are spread across the European continent and Atlantic Ocean. It will offer a first glimpse of the effects of running a DAS in the L-and C- Bands on a live DWDM telecoms system, in combination with SOP, in a submarine and terrestrial environment.The aim of the SUBMERSE project is to disseminate the data following FAIR principles through established community data centres. The main challenges we have faced relate to ensuring compliance to security restrictions and handling huge data quantities generated by DAS.  The approaches to down sampling, frequency filtering, and potentially time-and-space-gating will also be presented.  We will discuss the approaches taken for acquiring, streaming from remote sites, data staging, pre-processing and raw file retention. We will also highlight the tools and approaches that we have adopted to develop best practices for running such a multi-national, distributed, sensing instrument which must take these elements into account.Our work has shown that a pragmatic approach, with collaboration at heart, is needed to address these challenges. Without a strong commitment and collaboration between research communities and research infrastructure providers, the potential to lose valuable research data is high. This risk can be mitigated by focusing on datasets which are valuable to communities and ensuring the long-term availability of those data sets in a F.A.I.R manner.

Addressing the challenges posed by climate change in recent decades, particularly in Arctic and freshwater ecosystems, requires integrating diverse datasets across disciplines, cultures, and political boundaries. Although Canada has invested significantly in research infrastructure, much of its environmental data continues to be fragmented and difficult to access. The Canadian Watershed Information Network (CanWIN) provides a decentralized open-access platform that fosters research collaboration and knowledge sharing. By implementing CARE and FAIR principles and best practices for data stewardship, CanWIN enables ethical and transparent data sharing, supporting reconciliation efforts with Indigenous communities and enhancing evidence-based decision-making in response to climate and environmental change. An example project in collaboration with the Manitoba Métis Federation is highlighted.

<p>One of the major goals of the upcoming European integrated Long-Term Ecosystem  critical zone and socio-ecological Research Infrastructure (eLTER RI) is to provide reliable and quality-controlled long-term environmental data from various disciplines for scientific analysis as well as the assessment of environmental policy impacts. For this purpose, eLTER has been designing and piloting a federated data infrastructure for integration and dissemination of a broad range of <em>in situ</em> observations and related data.<br>Implementing such a pan-European environmental data infrastructure is a lengthy and complex process driven by user needs, shareholder requirements and general service and technology best practises. The European LTER community has laid the foundations of this eLTER Information System. For further improvements, user needs have recently been collected by (a) targeted interviews with selected stakeholders to identify requirements, (b) workshops mapping requirements to potential RI services, and (c) analysis work for designing the RI service portfolio for. The requirements collections are used to derive functional (i.e. the behaviour of essential features of the system) and non-functional (i.e. the general characteristics of the system) requirements for the IT infrastructure and services. These collected requirements revolve around the development of workflows for the ingestion, curation and publication of data objects including the creation, harvesting, discovery and visualisation of metadata as well as providing means to support the analysis of these datasets and communicating study results.<br>Considering that downstream analyses of data from both eLTER and other RIs are a key part of the RI´s scope the design includes virtual collaborative environments where different data and analyses can be brought together and results shared with FAIR principles as the default for research practice. The eLTER RI will take advantage of data stored in existing partner data systems, harmonised by a central discovery portal and federated data access components providing a common information management infrastructure for bridging across environmental RIs.<br>This presentation will provide an overview of the current stage of the eLTER RI developments as well as its major components, provide an outlook for future developments and discuss the technical and scientific challenges of building the eLTER RI for interdisciplinary data sharing.</p>

The GEOROC synthesis database, a pioneering open-access resource for geochemical and isotopic data, marks 25 years of service to the geoscience community. Over its history, GEOROC has compiled data from more than 22,750 publications in the field of geochemistry, and provides free access to over 39 million individual data values, primarily on igneous and metamorphic rocks, minerals and their inclusions. As a cornerstone for interdisciplinary research, GEOROC is complementary to other geochemical synthesis databases like PetDB, AstroMat and GeoReM, in facilitating reuse of data for innovative studies that leverage data analytics and machine-learning approaches across geoscientific disciplines and beyond.The Digital Geochemical Data Infrastructure (DIGIS) project for GEOROC 2.0 is providing an up-to-date IT infrastructure that aligns GEOROC with the FAIR principles. Data findability and accessibility are ensured through the newly developed API and the improved GEOROC web interface that allows users to retrieve a variety of distinct data products and services, including a fully customizable search functionality. Interoperability is achieved via implementation of a feature-based data model compatible with the OGC Observations and Measurements standard and controlled, machine-readable vocabularies that harmonize geospatial, analytical and sample-related metadata, and enabling seamless integration in multiple databases and portals (e.g., EarthChem). Reusability is further supported by archiving time-stamped GEOROC data products in the DIGIS Data Repository, hosted by GFZ Data Services, where datasets with digital object identifiers (DOIs) are archived for the long-term. Additionally, researchers are encouraged to directly submit new or already “published” datasets to this domain repository—through standardized (meta-)data templates, ensuring high-quality data submissions that facilitate data quality assessment and reuse.In collaboration with national and global initiatives, such as OneGeochemistry and NFDI4Earth, the DIGIS project further promotes practical approaches to the FAIR principles for geochemistry by developing unified controlled vocabularies for geochemical data and their metadata (e.g., analytical methods, sample description, location). These vocabularies also integrate external standards, such as the International Mineralogical Association’s "List of Minerals" and MinDat’s "Subdivisions of Rocks," alongside newly developed (and published) frameworks for categories such as geological setting and analytical methods (collaboration with EarthChem). By harmonizing metadata across geospatial, analytical and sample-related categories, these efforts ensure consistency, improve data quality assessment and control and enhance interoperability across data systems, including but not limited to GEOROC, PetDB, and AusGeochem. Such advancements expand the potential applications of geochemical data, fostering innovation in fields such as environmental science, remote sensing, archaeology and geohealth.With 25 years of experience and ongoing innovation through the DIGIS project, the GEOROC database exemplifies how operationalizing the FAIR principles enhances its value as a critical resource for the geoscience community. By providing both FAIR and open data, GEOROC empowers researchers to conduct reproducible, impactful studies and fosters interdisciplinary collaboration, driving innovation and advancing progress across the geosciences.

The Geo-INQUIRE (Geosphere INfrastructure for QUestions into Integrated REsearch) project, supported by the Horizon Europe Programme, is aimed at enhancing services to make data and high-level products accessible to the broad Geoscience scientific community. Geo-INQUIRE’s goal is to encourage curiosity-driven studies into understanding the geosphere dynamics at the interface between the solid Earth, the oceans and the atmosphere using long data streams, high-performance computing and cutting-edge facilities. The Geo-INQUIRE Transnational Access (TA) covers both virtual and on-site access to a variety of state of the art laboratories, facilities, experimental sites (testbeds) and computational resources with the aim of enabling the development of excellent ground-breaking science. Six research infrastructures located across Europe, referred to as “testbeds”, will provide locations for users to perform experiments in a variety of environments from the Earth’s surface (both on land and at sea) to the subsurface; over different spatial scales: from small-scale experiments in laboratories to kilometric submarine fibre cables. These sites are: the Bedretto Laboratory (Switzerland); the Ella-Link Geolab (Portugal); the Liguria-Nice-Monaco submarine infrastructure (Italy/France); the Irpinia Near-Fault Observatory (Italy); the Eastern Sicily facility (Italy); and the Corinth Rift Laboratory (Greece). In addition, ECCSEL-ERIC is providing access to 5 of its research facilities focussing on CO2 Capture, Utilisation, Transport and Storage. The facilities providing access are: Svelvik CO2 Field Lab (Norway), PITOP Borehole Geophysical Test Site (Italy), Sotacarbo Fault Laboratory (Italy), Catenoy experimental site and gas-water-rock interaction Laboratory in Oise (France) and the Mobile Seismic Array (the Netherlands) which is fully mobile and can be deployed anywhere in the world. TA will be also offered for software and workflows belonging to the EPOS-ERIC and the ChEESE Centre of Excellence for Exascale in Solid Earth. These are grounded on simulation of seismic waves and rupture dynamics in complex media, tsunamis, subaerial and submarine landslides. HPC-based Probabilistic Tsunami, Seismic and Volcanic Hazard workflows are offered to assess hazard at high-resolution with extensive uncertainty exploration. Support and collaboration will be offered to the awardees to facilitate the access and usage of HPC resources for tackling geoscience problems. Geo-INQUIRE will grant TA to researchers to develop their own lab-based or numerical experiments with the aim of advancing scientific knowledge of Earth processes while fostering cross-disciplinary research across Europe. The data and products generated during the TAs will be made available to the scientific community via the project’s strict adherence to FAIR principles. To be granted, researchers submit a proposal to the TA calls that will be issued three times during the project life. The first call was launched on the 9th January. Calls will be advertised on the Geo-INQUIRE website https://www.geo-inquire.eu/ and through the existing community channels.

The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a distributed research infrastructure (RI) with the mission to establish and maintain sustainable and long-term access to solid Earth science data and services by integrating the diverse national research infrastructures under a common federated framework governed by EPOS ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). This paper presents the EPOS approach to ensure financial viability and to tackle the challenge of long-term sustainability of the RI during its operational phase. The EPOS approach to sustainable operation considers the scientific impact and the promotion of scientific research as the preconditions to achieve long-term sustainability. Enabling scientific excellence implies that high-quality data and services are provided reliably and continuously to establish the RI as the enabler of investigations to solid Earth scientists. The strategic approach and the solutions adopted by EPOS ERIC to address the long-term sustainability of a pan-European distributed RI are discussed in this paper focusing on the governance structure, considered as the qualifying dimension that gathers and connects the financial, legal and technical dimensions. The governance and the financial models are discussed to delineate the legal framework necessary to operate the EPOS RI relying on the implemented technical solutions. A sufficiently stable investment environment is necessary to allow the RI to concentrate on providing high quality services for their user communities. This paper discusses the current actions and challenges to be addressed for achieving this goal.