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This document provides a synopsis of the unique issues associated with acquiring digital services for research in the EOSC, drawing out issues (e.g. perceived incompatibility with legal and regulatory frameworks) alongside further investigation into whether vouchers access models can be used as a viable mechanism to provide a long-term solution for making services available free at the point of use, exploring sponsored use scenarios, and developing considerations for future EOSC Central Purchasing Bodies or intermediary organisations that act as demand aggregators in the EOSC context.

Over the last decades, several data preservation efforts have been undertaken by the HEP community, as experiments are not repeatable and consequently their data considered unique. ARCHIVER is a European Commission (EC) co-funded Horizon 2020 pre-commercial procurement project procuring R&D combining multiple ICT technologies including data-intensive scalability, network, service interoperability and business models, in a hybrid cloud environment. The results will provide the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) with archival and preservation services covering the full research lifecycle. The services are co-designed in partnership with four research organisations (CERN, DESY, EMBL-EBI and PIC/IFAE) deploying use cases from Astrophysics, HEP, Life Sciences and Photon-Neutron Sciences creating an innovation ecosystem for specialist data archiving and preservation companies willing to introduce new services capable of supporting the expanding needs of research. The HEP use cases being deployed include the CERN Opendata portal, preserving a second copy of the completed BaBar experiment and the CERN Digital Memory digitising CERN’s multimedia archive of the 20th century. In parallel, ARCHIVER has established an Early Adopter programme whereby additional use cases can be incorporated at each of the project phases thereby expanding services to multiple research domains and countries.

The vast amounts of data generated by scientific research pose enormous challenges for capturing, managing and processing this data. Many trials have been made in different projects (such as HNSciCloud and OCRE), but today, commercial cloud services do not yet play a major role in the production computing environments of the publicly funded research sector in Europe. Funded by the Next Generation Internet programme (NGI-Atlantic) from the EC, in partnership with the University California San Diego (UCSD), CERN is piloting the use of CloudBank in Europe. CloudBank has been developed by the UCSD, University of Washington and University of California, Berkeley with NSF grant support, to provide a set of managed services simplifying access to public cloud for research and education, via a cloud procurement partnership with Strategic Blue, a financial broker SME, specialised in cost management and optimisation. The European NGI experiment is provisioning cloud services from multiple vendors and deploying a series of use-cases in the domain of Machine Learning and HPCaaS, contributing to the scientific programme of the Large Hadron Collider. The main objective is to address technical, financial and legal challenges to determine whether CloudBank can be successfully used by Europe’s research community as part of its global research activity.

Leveraging lessons learned on previous activities to access commercial cloud services, CERN is leading the task “requirements collection for commodity cloud services” in the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. In a two-fold activity, CERN built on the work performed during the award-winning HNSciCloud project, introducing voucher schemes to research, collaborating with the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc)and Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), in order to collect requirements for individual researchers (OCRE Wave 1). The second activity relates to the definition of the requirements for the establishment of a “Buyers Group” model, derived from Pre-Commercial Procurement exercises, where a lead buyer organisation aggregates demand and financial pre-commitments, acting on behalf of a set of organisations or a community. These activities also build on the results of a demand-side market research to understand the needs and level of demand for digital services for the research community, in the context of the EOSC. The market analysis is documented in the EOSC-hub D12.1 deliverable “Procurement requirements and demand assessment”. The combination of these activities contributed to the establishment of the baseline for requirement collection both for Individual Organisations (OCRE Wave 2) and the aggregation model based on Buyers Groups (OCRE Wave 3). This document will be complemented by a quantitative analysis of the requirements presented.

Leveraging lessons learned on voucher schemes to access commercial cloud services, CERN is leading the task “requirements collection for commodity cloud services” in the Open Clouds for Research Environments (OCRE) project. To this end, CERN collaborated with the European Council of Doctoral Candidates and Junior Researchers (Eurodoc) and the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA) to launch a comprehensive survey targeted to individual researchers in Europe. The analysis of the responses allowed the identification of consumption habits, needs and technical requirements of individual researchers for commercial cloud services. The conclusions of this analysis are proposed as an input for the implementation of voucher schemes in the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

In order to encourage wide deployment of solutions outside the consortium, the ARCHIVER project will engage with a group of “Early Adopters”. The Early Adopter model has been developed in the context of the HNSciCloud PCP. Early Adopters are public organisations having a need for innovative digital archiving and preservation solutions that the services resulting from the ARCHIVER project may be satisfying. Public organisations expressing interest in the programme will formally be listed in the Request for Tender and will be entitled to several benefits such as providing feedback on the tender documents, access to material produced by contractors during the execution phases, access to limited testing capacity provided by the buyers group, benefit from training sessions organised in the context of ARCHIVER covering topics such as OAIS, FAIR principles, Open Data, EOSC, etc. Early adopters will also potentially profit from the same commercialisation conditions as the buyer group organisations participating in the project, in the case of purchase of services developed after the end of the project and be able to use the procurement funds foresseen in other EC projects in the EOSC context, on which the Early Adopter is member, in the, to procure the resulting services developed in ARCHIVER. In case of a significant number of applications to join the Early Adopters Group, the Buyers Group reserves the right to define selection criteria to select the most appealing candidates. This document presents the overall Early Adopters’ engagement plan and the actions foreseen to reach the desired number of interested parties.

Based on the experience and lessons learned from the Helix Nebula Science Cloud project, this paper identifies best practices as regards voucher schemes for accessing commercial cloud services for research purposes in Europe. Furthermore, this paper proposes recommendations for the implementation of voucher schemes in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).