LEAPS Data Strategy released
The continuous evolution of photon and neutron (PaN) sources and their instrumentation enables more and new scientific endeavours at ever increasing pace. This technological evolution is accompanied by an exponential growth of data volumes of increasing complexity, which must be addressed by maximising efficiency of scientific experiments and automation of workflows covering the entire data lifecycle, aiming to reduce data volumes while producing FAIR and open data of highest reliability. Moreover, data center running costs and increasing energy consumption that have to be addressed in a data strategy.
This is why, in July 2023, LEAPS, in collaboration with representatives of the LENS community, released its new Data Strategy [1], which was published in the European Physical Journal Plus.
The document outlines twenty objectives that the LEAPS facilities management should endorse and adopt in order to deal with the huge amounts of data being produced and to ensure that the best use of data is made.
Objectives refer to the following areas:
- Increasing efficiency of experiments
- EOSC
- PaN Data Commons
- Training and e-learning
- Sustainable software
- Climate-change and Green IT
- Sharing know-how
First and foremost, implementing the objectives will serve the creators of the data (i.e., experimental teams), to deal more efficiently with their data, towards doing better science while adhering to the principles of Open Science. To achieve this, the LEAPS management is strongly committed to implementing the FAIR principles for data in order to share them with the scientific community and to maximise their reuse. Implementing the objectives outlined in the LEAPS data strategy will contribute to minimising the amount of data which are not published, and thereby to improving the efficiency in terms of scientific publications and energy consumption of the LEAPS facilities.
The paper briefly outlines the strategy of the league of European accelerator-based photon sources user facilities to achieve these goals collaboratively in an efficient and sustainable way, which will ultimately lead to an increase in the number of publications.
[1] Götz, A., le Gall, E., Konrad, U. et al. LEAPS data strategy. Eur. Phys. J. Plus 138, 617 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-023-04189-6
