The European Plate Observing System (EPOS) is a distributed research infrastructure (RI) with the mission to establish and maintain sustainable and long-term access to solid Earth science data and services by integrating the diverse national research infrastructures under a common federated framework governed by EPOS ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium). This paper presents the EPOS approach to ensure financial viability and to tackle the challenge of long-term sustainability of the RI during its operational phase. The EPOS approach to sustainable operation considers the scientific impact and the promotion of scientific research as the preconditions to achieve long-term sustainability. Enabling scientific excellence implies that high-quality data and services are provided reliably and continuously to establish the RI as the enabler of investigations to solid Earth scientists. The strategic approach and the solutions adopted by EPOS ERIC to address the long-term sustainability of a pan-European distributed RI are discussed in this paper focusing on the governance structure, considered as the qualifying dimension that gathers and connects the financial, legal and technical dimensions. The governance and the financial models are discussed to delineate the legal framework necessary to operate the EPOS RI relying on the implemented technical solutions. A sufficiently stable investment environment is necessary to allow the RI to concentrate on providing high quality services for their user communities. This paper discusses the current actions and challenges to be addressed for achieving this goal.

<p>Modern scientific endeavours already have the capacity to call upon a vast variety of data, often in huge volumes. However, the challenge is not only how to make the most of such a resource, but also how to make it available to the wider scientific community, especially for encouraging curiosity-driven research. Fifty-one institutions from 13 countries are currently working together in the Geo-INQUIRE (Geosphere INfrastructure for QUestions into Integrated REsearch) project.</p> <p>The main goal of this new project is to enhance, give access to, and make interoperable, key datasets of the Geoscience community. This will include "big" data streams and high-performance computing codes which are critical to studying the temporal variation of the solid Earth, forecasting multi-hazards, evaluating Georesources and the analysis of the interface between the solid Earth as well as oceans and atmosphere.  <span lang="EN-GB">About 150 access points – both on-site and virtually are involved. Transnational Access (TA, both virtual and on-site) will be provided at six test beds across Europe: the Bedretto Laboratory, Switzerland; the Ella-Link Geolab, Portugal; the Liguria-Nice-Monaco submarine infrastructure, Italy/France; the Irpinia Near-Fault Observatory, Italy; the Eastern Sicily facility, Italy; and the Corinth Rift Laboratory, Greece.</span></p> <p>Several European Research Infrastructure Consortia take part, namely the European Plate Observing System (EPOS) for solid Earth and geodynamics observations, the European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and Water Column Observatory (EMSO) for deep-sea and coastal observations, and ECCSEL for CO<sub>2</sub> capture, utilization, transport, and storage, and geoenergy. This 16 million Euro project started in October 2022, within the Horizon Europe Infrastructure program of the European Union.</p> <p>The presentation will briefly describe the project and give examples of curiosity-driven research topics which will be made possible through such a multi-disciplinary project. We will finally present the challenges and efforts made to comply with FAIR principles and accompany the dissemination of the data with innovative and cross-disciplinary training activities.</p>

<p>Many geophysical data centers are being asked by their sponsors and funding agencies to provide information on what data and services are used by whom and for what purpose in greater detail than customary in the past, when bulk information about the number of users/accesses and volumes of download were deemed sufficient in most cases. Up to now, data centers generally offer anonymous access to large parts of their holdings, with different approaches to basic monitoring and access logging, e.g. by IP address, as a rough proxy, that allows one to infer geographical user distribution to some detail. </p><p>Already today, access to embargoed or otherwise restricted data, or to advanced functions like personal work spaces and computational resources, is usually protected by user authentication and authorisation. Standardization of the identity management protocols is a requirement for further supporting the federation of data centers and their services, also in light of future integration with cloud services or other integrated services. For example in seismology, federated data retrieval systems follow a specific credential process based on standards for data exchange and web services established and maintained by the International Federation of Digital Seismograph Networks (FDSN). </p><p>These new information requirements from funding agencies would, however, require implementing identity management systems and some sort of user identification / authentication to many or all data center services and resources. This is raising concerns within the data centers on a number of aspects: Evidence from other domains demonstrates that requiring authentication reduces the use of data center services; enforcing authentication is often perceived as being not in line with best practices for open science; implementing identity management for usage profiling may lead to significantly increased effort at the data centers, especially with regard to compliance with data protection legislation like GDPR, and it may significantly impede automated (scripted) machine-to-machine access; the level of detail that should be reported back to funding agencies is unclear and there are doubts whether detailed user profiling is a reasonable ‘performance indicator’. Indeed, such knowledge gathering on users needs to be obtained through technical implementations that take into account the impact on user experience, the impact on decades of research tool development, and the resources necessary to implement and operate such systems, whether embedded into the operational services or taking other forms such as surveys and outreach to user groups.</p><p>Relevant discussions have now started among representatives of major geophysical data centers so that interim plans can be shared, ideas and experiences exchanged, and standard approaches can be developed and recommended for consideration by the community. In these discussions we consider both scenarios where identity management is useful and relevant or where we may consolidate our views and arguments with respect to the general user data reporting requests.</p>