This year marks a new stage for the Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC) initiative. After being proposed during the golden autumn in Beijing 2019, and jointly endorsed as an international initiative starting in 2021, the GOSC initiative has made pioneering progress collaboratively by the steering group, working groups, and case studies. Among all of these engagements, a cloud federated testbed spanning China, Europe, and Africa has been carried out. Funded by the Beijing Municipal Science and Technology Commission, this testbed has achieved steady progress. The China-EU-Africa internet connectivity has been enhanced based on the close collaboration between CNIC and GEANT. The CSTCloudAAI is under development to guarantee secured authentication and authorization infrastructure services to domestic and alien users. And the CSTCloud-EGI testbed has been put into production to support disciplinary demonstrations in life sciences, space physics, earth science, SDG-13, etc.  

As stated in the UNESCO Recommendation, open science infrastructures highlight features such as international interconnectivity, accessibility, and interoperability. This cross-continent testbed provides a regional implementation, in which Beijing, China plays an active role. "Beijing is embracing open science. For example, we have devoted years of efforts in pursing open sharing of major scientific research facilities, research papers, datasets, etc", says Ms. Wang Yiqi, Deputy Director of Beijing International Science and Technology Cooperation Center. As for the next step, the global GOSC team will endeavor to break policy and technical silos to extend the capabilities of the current testbed to support different open science programs across disciplines.  "The whole year’s work consists in a good start in spring", and welcome all stakeholders to join this global initiative for a wonderful open science journey.

(Li Xueting, Lili Zhang) 

Welcome for further collaboration and stay tuned at https://bit.ly/3jwZHNg