The South African Department of Science and Innovation (DSI) has convened a dialogue with EU experts for a Policy Framework Report to inform the establishment of a South African Open Science Cloud (SAOSC). The EGI Foundation contributed expertise and knowledge to the project, which ended with submitting the Report to the DSI on 15 July 2022.
Based on the EOSC experience and tuned to the South African research infrastructure landscape, the SAOSC Policy Framework defines principles and guidelines to establish an Open Science Cloud focused on research, development, and innovation in South Africa.
The Report formulates policy recommendations for the DSI in four key areas concerned with the future implementation of the SAOSC: governance, technology, research data management and sustainability. Principles and recommendations result from broad consultation with EU and SA stakeholders, carried out closely with ongoing policy developments in South Africa, including the Open Science Policy led by the DSI. During the project, we extended the Report’s scope to include synergies with other international partners, mindful of emerging global initiatives to promote alignment and interoperability between shared infrastructures to empower equitable research collaboration.
The Report is a confidential document, but we expect the DSI might produce a public version in future, as had been the case with the result of a previous SA-EU Open Science Dialogue Report.
EGI.eu is looking forward to the take up of the recommendations and the inclusion of current research infrastructure developments into the SAOSC roadmap. In this context, it’s interesting to remind the readers of this news item about the recent integration of ILIFU-UCT, an Openstack infrastructure hosted at the University of Cape Town in the EGI Federated Cloud.
