Report on 1st Period of Virtual Access, including User Committee's assessment
Creators: name: IMDEA Networks
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2024

description: Research data sharing and access is yet not mature in the communities covering the domains covered

by SLICES. There is very little incentive to share research data for the many reasons that have been

properly identified. SLICES has the potential to change the research methodology by providing a

simple access to data sharing and a reward for those sharing their data.

Developing a relevant solution (MRS/SFDO) takes time thus this process is currently in progress and

should be made available in its basic form for the SLICES pre-operation that will start in Q4 2024. In

the meantime, acknowledging that it is a slow start, we have developed a preliminary solution, that

has a value to raise awareness and kickstart the process. In order to better understand how it should

develop in the future we have conducted a survey, collected the advice from the SLICES User

Committee, furthermore, we provided a self-assessment of our solution and how it should develop in

the future.

Virtual Access (VA) to the SLICES Research Infrastructures is an open and free access provided to the

Starting Community of users and researchers. The provision of VA to the SLICES-RI is aided through

datasets and tools that allow the preparatory work for experiments and even also for offline running

of experiments. The Transnational Access (TA) (physical or remote access) mainly consists of high-

performance computer systems that host bleeding-edge communication and networking technology

equipment, testing networks and grids. The VA mainly consists of the exposure of datasets and tools

of produced experimentation results.

The VA activities in SLICES-SC act complementary to the TA access, described in Deliverable D8.2 on

First Report on Transnational Access, with data and tools produced either through the latter, or

created and provided from the testbed operators. Access to Virtual Access services is free-of-charge,

and directly findable and discoverable in the SLICES Open Data and Tools repositories (SLICES CKAN1

and GitLab servers2 respectively). The datasets are semantically annotated, towards promoting the

migration to EOSC-II, and provided in different formats.

In this document, we describe the methodology and results of an assessment of these VA services

(reported in the deliverable D8.4 that covers the first period of the project). The SLICES User

Committee (UC), composed by external members of the consortium, was initially assigned the task of

assessing the VA services. UC has been also involved in the evaluation process of the different open

calls for experiments. The initial plan was to have the UC assessment in the final report D8.5 but during

the negotiation of the amendment, it was decided to include this new deliverable D8.6 for reporting

a broader picture regarding the situation of SLICES VA considering the limited amount of publicly

available data and limited maturity and experience of this type of service by our community.

This is a first step in the offering of a VA for SLICES, as we learn by doing, and expect that our future

plans will deliver the components to support the full research life-cycle.