ESCAPE partners recommit for Open Science

During the “ESCAPE to the Future” conference that took place last week in Brussels many of Europe’s biggest facilities in physics-related disciplines have signed a new Open Collaboration Agreement. 

The European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructure (ESCAPE) project, started in 2019, has brought together a cluster of ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) projects and other world-class research organizations with the aim of implementing a section of a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to foster Open Science in astrophysics and particle physics. 

Now that ESCAPE is coming to an end, nine core ESCAPE Research Infrastructure partners have signed a new Open Collaboration Agreement, the ESCAPE Collaboration, to continue this work: the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory (CTAO), the KM3NeT Neutrino Telescope Research Infrastructure (KM3NeT), the European Gravitational Observatory (EGO-Virgo), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the European Solar Telescope (EST), the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), the Joint Institute for VLBI-ERIC (JIV-ERIC) and the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO).

“Scientific Research is progressing towards the new paradigm of Open Science for more open, transparent, collaborative and inclusive scientific practices to enhance the impact of science in our society, fostered by the expansion of information and communication technologies. This is the fundamental motivation of the ESCAPE scientific community and it is also the challenge shared by pan-European Research Infrastructures (RIs) that are members of the ESCAPE science cluster,” explains Dr. Giovanni Lamanna, Coordinator of the ESCAPE project. “The successful work programme, the achievements and the ability of ESCAPE RIs to cooperate in the context of open data intensive science to lead to new insights and innovation are widely recognised. The ESCAPE RIs are willing to continue cooperative actions by joining their efforts. Bottom-up demands of the involved scientists not to interrupt but to continue the cross-fertilisation in science and innovation that ESCAPE has been able to build, are strongly considered. For these reasons a new ESCAPE open collaboration agreement is established.”

“We are clearly entering a new era”, said EGO Director Stavros Katsanevas, “where the fundamental science research has to couple strongly to the knowledge of computing science, demanding new “double skilled” scientists and engineers, inventing innovative but also standardised algorithms and pipelines, mindfull for their multi-messenger potential, carbon impact, openess to citizen science practices and inclusion potential. The ESCAPE collaboration has all the prerequisites to become a major actor in this endeavour”

Learn more about ESCAPE here: https://projectescape.eu/