How EGI support Social Science and Humanities communities

Rooted in the physics community, EGI has been evolving to support various domains of science. This requires developing a good understanding of the requirements from different science fields and continuing to adjust EGI service solutions to meet their needs.  OPERAS is the European Research Infrastructure for developing open scholarly communication in the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). A collaboration between EGI and OPERAS has existed since OPERAS-P, a Horizon2020 project running in 2019-2021, where EGI contributed to OPERAS’ ESFRI application and completed the e-Need part, which is one of 5 major sections. The application was successfully approved, putting OPERAS on the ESFRI Roadmap in Jun 2021. EGI also responded by setting up AAI for the OPERAS Research Infrastructure using the EGI Check-in service and made efforts to investigate the community AAI requirements to design and implement user management structure and to integrate Check-in with several OPERAS services. EGI is currently participating in another OPERAS project TRIPLE (2019-2023), which focuses on developing discovery services for the SSH community. EGI supports TRIPLE with the Check-in integration to be aligned with the OPERAS AAI model. Among other things, EGI also provides expertise for FitSM training, EOSC interoperability and consultancy for sustainability. EGI invited OPERAS to participate in EGI-ACE (2020-2023) as a unique Data Space for SSH. The data space investigates how to Cloud-enable OPERAS services. The Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been signed, and the Cloud resources are provided by the French IN2P3 site. On 24th May 2022, EGI and OPERAS signed a long-term collaboration Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) which defines joint activities in 4 areas:

1. Coordinated co-design, implementation and delivery of infrastructure services
2. Research community support
3. Impact, dissemination and outreach
4. Common strategies and explore membership and cross-membership options

More importantly, both parties will explore options of membership and cross-membership within EGI and OPERAS governance and will seek opportunities for involvement in other projects bilaterally. EGI will support OPERAS in becoming a more sustainable and influential research infrastructure in Europe, eventually becoming a European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC). OPERAS will bring the SSH user community to EGI, providing community requirements to help EGI improve e-Infrastructure service development. The MoU with OPERAS shows that EGI is confident in stretching its service solutions and technical support across a large range of domains of science, from Physics to Social Science communities.   Author: Yin Chen Edited by: Magdalena Brus and Gwen Franck