Open Science in action with EGI Notebooks and Zenodo

Giuseppe La Rocca describes a practical example of service integration in support of open science 

Would you be able to name three important pillars of Open Science? Data, code and papers are the keywords you’re looking for. To support the implementation of the Open Science principles with open-source solutions and open services, the EGI Foundation is promoting the integration of the following services: Jupyter, Binder, GitHub and Zenodo.

In particular when speaking about services that support data analysis and visualisation, such as the EGI Notebooks service. 

The service provides a user-friendly and highly flexible Jupyter-based web environment for the development and execution of data analysis and visualisation, and can contain programming codes in various languages. Users are enabled to easily share concepts, ideas and working applications, and - combined with Binder - the Jupyter notebooks are allowed to be reproducible and reusable by anyone, anywhere.

In combination with Zenodo, the open access repository for research publications, scientific data and other ‘research objects’, users are supported to easily engage with the concept of Open Science. Since the end of 2019, the EGI Notebooks service has been in production. Key to the stability of the service is a Binder integration, which is being developed. Currently runned in Alpha, the service is already being used in the PaNOSC cluster project and in some of the EOSC-Hub Early Adopter Programme (EAP) applications, and under evaluation by some EOSC-hub CCs.

To share more know-how on the EGI Notebooks service, it is included in the EGI Community Webinar Programme which was recently launched. The objectives of the past webinar, that took place on the 7th of May, were to show what the service offers to researchers and communities, how it supports compute- or data-intensive tasks and how to use the EGI Notebooks service with Binder and other open-source solutions. For those who’ve missed it, the webinar has been recorded and to be found on the EGI YouTube channel under the dedicated webinar playlist. Training material and examples of the Notebooks can be found on the EOSC-hub website.

Giuseppe La Rocca is Community Team Lead at the EGI Foundation and leads the training programme of the EOSC-hub project.