According to a survey led by Nature in 2016, 70% of scientists admitted they could not reproduce another scientist’s experiments and more than half could not reproduce their own. In order to improve sharing and, in turn, enhancing innovation, the European Union is working on implementing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), a kind of “library” of all experimental raw data and methods, available to everyone.
The ESRF is doing its bit by leading the PaNOSC (Photon and Neutron Open Science Cloud) project: “We are in the process of implementing the ESRF Data Policy to organise the data from experiments in an archive, which ultimately everyone will be able to access. The scientific teams will have three years to keep their data closed to the public, and after that any other scientist can try to repeat or do new data analysis of the very same experiment if he or she wishes to”, explains Andy Götz, coordinator of the project. The final goal of PaNOSC and the EOSC is to make data from publicly funded research in Europe Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR).
>Read more on the ESRF website
Image: Alessa Gambardella at a stereomicroscope looking at ultramarine blue in Hendrick per Brugghen’s The Adoration of the Kings (1619)
Credit: Courtesy of Department of Conservation & Science, Rijksmuseum.