The SIESTA project, with a total duration of 36 months and an investment of around EUR 5 million (EC funding of around EUR 5 million), is coordinated by the Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Spain).

algoWatt S.p.A., received a loan of EUR 113,998.50 (total project expenditure EUR 227,997.00) for Digital Energy Service Provider activities.

THE PROJECT

The challenge of managing sensitive data is an ever-present one for the organisations that generate and use such data. Providing access to such sensitive datasets for a fair and right usage is even more challenging, especially when data involves individuals and data protection regulations must be fulfilled. Meanwhile, Open Science standards advocate for the publication of open data as an essential tool to build an informed society, as well as to enable improvements in business services and solutions. In research, it is fundamental to reuse data in order to maximize return on investment into both research and society, but this is not often the case when data is of sensitive nature.

Providing access to data is a cornerstone of Open Science, but facilitating access is not enough for promoting reproducible scientific research. Proper metadata and documentation should accompany the data in order to make them usable: the FAIR Guiding Principles for Scientific Data management and stewardship provide a roadmap to enable proper access and reusability of scientific data, and thus their implementation in the research data life cycle is a key goal of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

However, when dealing with sensitive or confidential data, there are still open questions on how to better implement these FAIR and Open Science principles to it, preserving privacy/confidentiality on the one hand, and providing data that is still useful from a scientific perspective on the other hand. Data providers need assurances of high standards of security and privacy before allowing access to sensitive datasets. However, existing solutions like safe rooms, safe pods or data safe havens are often challenging for the development of reproducible research and seem counter-intuitive when dealing with open science and FAIR principles. They can be challenging in terms of usability for researchers, or when trying to set up multidisciplinary and/or transnational collaborations.

There is a clear need and an increased interest and plans to overcome these restrictions in order to benefit from the possibilities for research of access to bigger datasets in transnational and multidisciplinary collaborations.

In this context, the SIESTA project will enable sensitive data stakeholders with a set of tools, services and methodologies to enable the effective sharing of sensitive data so that researchers and data scientists can productively exploit those data assets. Following a cloud-based model and approach, SIESTA will provide userfriendly tools with the aim of fostering the uptake of sensitive data sharing and processing in the EOSC.

The SIESTA overall goal is to deliver trusted cloud-based environments for the management and sharing of sensitive data that are built in a reproducible way, together with a set of services and tools to ease the secure sharing of sensitive data in the EOSC, through state-of-the-art anonymization techniques.

The SIESTA platform will focus on usability as well as reproducibility, in order to provide a low entry barrier for new users and data stakeholders, as well as providing researchers with a way to replicate a given analysis environment.

This global objective will be set up through the following five specific objectives:

O1: Enhance the EOSC Exchange services by delivering a set of cloud-based trusted environments for the analysis of sensitive data in the EOSC demonstrating the feasibility of the FAIR principles over them

O2: Study, explore and demonstrate the feasibility of FAIR management and processing of sensitive data, showcasing the benefits for society, science and research.

O3: Deliver tools for the secure anonymization or pseudonymisation of datasets, allowing rightholders to safely release sensitive data through the EOSC Exchange

O4: Provide rightholders and other relevant stakeholders with best practices and methodologies for the release of sensitive data following FAIR principles, including design principles for compute infrastructures allowing access to them, exploring the feasibility of FAIR data workflows over sensitive data

O5: Extend the service offer and the capabilities being offered through the EOSC portal, coordinating with the operational and management activities carried out by the EOSC partnership and related projects

SIESTA is coordinated by the Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC, Spain) – coordinator. The Consortium also incudes:

• Ustav informatiky Slovenskej akademie vied (IISAS, Slovakia)
• Javier de la Cueva (JdlC, Spain)
• Università di León (ULE, Spain)
• Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE, Spain)
• Institut national de la santé et de la recherche médicale (INSERM, France)
• Centro nazionale della ricerca scientifica (CNRS, France)
• Università Radboud di Nijmegen (SRU, Netherlands)
• Fondazione ISI (ISI, Italy)
• InterWay, a.s. (IWAY, Slovakia)
• Cendio Aktiebolag (CEN, Sweden)
• algoWatt SpA (ALWA, Italy)