European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN
CERN, “where the Web was born”, is funded by 20 European Member States with a budget of around 1,000 MCHF/yr. CERN has 2,500 permanent staff and hosts some 10,000 HEP scientists from more than 250 institutes in 85 countries. The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is just starting operation, is the world’s largest and most powerful scientific instrument, producing around 15 Petabytes of particle-collision data per year to scientists worldwide. CERN has chosen Grid technology to address the huge data storage and analysis challenge of LHC. CERN has prominently contributed, and contributes today, to dozens of EC co-funded Grid projects and coordinates the EGEE-III project which operates the largest multi-disciplinary Grid infrastructure in the world.
Over half a century ago the CERN charter enshrined that “… the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available” and it plays a leading role in both the European and worldwide Open Access movements. This Open Access vision and IT innovation come together through the development of Invenio, an Open Source digital library platform, which is now used to power INSPIRE, a digital library for the entire HEP.
The motivation for CERN to participate in APARSEN, and CERN vision, and its motivation to be a founding member of the Alliance for Permanent Access and a key contributor to the PARSE.Insight project (223758), is to foster best-practices in data sharing and explore opportunities generated by widespread access to unique and non-reproducible primary research data in HEP and beyond. CERN offers a unique complementary perspective of a producer of unique primary research data, as well as a major player in the design and construction of e-Infrastructures. At the same time, its INSPIRE digital library is emerging as a key player for digital preservation in the field, and APARSEN offers unique opportunities to integrate these research programs with industry standards and the wider, dynamic, network of stakeholders in digital preservation in the ERA.
CERN is also contributing to four FP7 projects relevant to the topics of this call: ODE (coordinator, 261530), charged to explore the opportunities for data preservation, exchange and re-use; SOAP (coordinator, 230220) charged to study Open Access publishing business models; D4-ScienceII (239019) where the INSPIRE will become interoperable within the emerging ecosystem of European e-Infrastructures; OpenAIRE (246686), which is powering the Open Access pilot of the EC.
