The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) – a pan-European distributed Research Infrastructure (RI) for solid Earth science – integrates its service EPOSAR in an open science publishing workflow with Research Community Dashboard (RCD). Through the integration of national research infrastructures and data, EPOS helps scientists to make a step change in developing new geo-hazards and geo-resources concepts and Earth science applications to address key societal challenges.

CNR-IREA is an Italian service provider of EPOS with a portfolio of satellite Earth Observation services aimed at generating value-added products for Solid Earth applications and natural disaster analysis, prevention and mitigation. EPOS scientists benefit from the on-demand EPOSAR service that implements an advanced Differential Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Interferometry (DInSAR) technique, referred to as Parallel Small Baseline Subset (P-SBAS) approach, to detect Earth surface displacements with sub-centimetre accuracy. The P-SBAS approach allows the generation of surface deformation time series and velocity maps by processing in a parallel and efficient way SAR dataset consisting of tens or hundreds of images acquired over the same investigated area. EPOSAR outputs are extremely effective to investigate natural (earthquakes, volcanic unrests, landslides) and/or man-made (tunneling excavations, aquifer exploitation, oil and gas storage and extraction, infrastructures monitoring) hazards.

EPOSAR can be accessed via the ESA’s Geohazards Exploitation Platform (GEP) that transparently offers scalable and parallel processing/analysis tools over pre-loaded satellite big datasets. Scientists can integrate their applications, i.e. analysis algorithms/chains like P-SBAS above for EPOSAR, and make them available as-a-service through the GEP geo-browser to other scientists.

GEP geo-browser

The community (beyond EPOS) has no specific best practices yet on how to deposit and cite the datasets resulting from EPOSAR or other EPOS services. A few journals have recently started to require the deposition of datasets in a data repository, but in general data is embedded in the article as an image or a table. This makes the overall degree of FAIR-ness and reproducibility in EPOS very low: datasets are often not shared as independent scientific products, provenance of datasets is not provided, and the experimental tools are not shared.

CNR-IREA integrates its EPOS services with the RCD in order to ensure publishing of research products and experiments in a way that supports their use, reuse and reproducibility. As a first step, scientists identify, interlink, and claim products relevant to the EPOS community. Secondly, the EPOSAR Graphical User Interface will be modified in order to let the user decide if to publish an experiment and relative results, thereby implementing a “on-demand publishing” workflow.

EPOSAR Graphical User Interface

Finally, to this aim, GEP will be equipped with a publishing component capable of fetching experiment and dataset information from the local databases, package them as products as required by Zenodo and deposit them via APIs on behalf of the EPOSAR authorized service under the EPOS community. More specifically, the publishing component generates for each experiment the two research products:

• A Zenodo “other product” of type “research object” relative to the experiment, encoded as a machine readable file;
• A Zenodo “datasets” relative to the output displacement time series or the velocity maps, consisting of the files described in the previous section.

Such products will be reciprocally interlinked, have their own DOI, given citation metadata, semantics links with other products if needed, and, as a consequence of being deposited in Zenodo under the EPOS community, be discoverable/browsable through the EPOS RCD. It is of course up to the users to opt when their experiment is mature enough to be published in OpenAIRE as a citable and preserved experiment object, and eventually cite the object from any articles they may produce.

Current status of integration with Zenodo:

• Creation of EPOSAR community
• Integration with Zenodo API
• Zenodo Metadata
• DOI pre-reservation for research object metadata updating
• Research object publishing

More information about open science publishing with EPOSAR in EPOS including an overview of technical efforts is provided in this conference paper:
Manghi, Paolo, Manunta, Michele, Baglioni, Miriam, Bardi, Alessia, Casu, Francesco, De Luca, Claudio, & Kokogiannaki, Argiro. (2018). Enabling Open Science publishing for Research Infrastructures via OpenAIRE: The EPOS use-case. Zenodo.