The DICE Call for Service Requests in now open!

The DICE Calls for Service Requests aim to encourage European researchers to take advantage of a set of digital storage services being made available free of charge by the European Commission. The offering includes a broad spectrum of services ranging from the familiar “personal drive storage” for individuals and small teams up to extremely sophisticated value-added facilities for long-term preservation, identification, metadata curation, and implementation of FAIR principles for data-intensive research projects. In addition, the DICE project has defined a simple and efficient process to minimize the time to service acquisition, reducing it in some cases to days.

What is the DICE Data Storage Service Offering?

DICE offers “something for everyone”, from the individual citizen scientist all the way up to the most demanding scientific research project.

• Personal/project workspaces contain different kinds of data services ranging from basic POSIX based filesystems, object-based storage to cloud storage services. Individual researchers and research teams use personal/project workspaces when doing active research and data is frequently changing during the data processing and analysis steps of the research data lifecycle. Comparable to the “personal drives” often seen in commercial offerings, these workspaces can be acquired rapidly by new users.
• Data archives contain high volume cost-efficient data services in which bit preservation level durability is ensured. These kinds of services are often used to safely store data to bridge projects and/or computing grants.
• Policy-based data archives offer value-added services on top of data archiving, for example automated quality and integrity checks, registration of persistent identifiers, replication across geographical locations or the publication of data sets. They offer a high curation level for your long-term, stable data archives.
• Data repositories make it possible to maintain your research data in a FAIR way. Data is harvested and automatically made discoverable via different search engines (e.g., EUDAT B2FIND, OpenAIRE Explorer). Communities can easily implement a FAIR digital repository in which research data can be maintained and preserved for the long term. Facilities are provided for assigning and minting persistent identifiers and DOIs.
• Data discovery makes research data discoverable from many different communities and scientific disciplines to support cross-disciplinary research. These services are of special interest for community data source owners. Data source owners can make their repositories harvestable and to make their research data widely discoverable in EOSC

How does it work?

Any individual, or research entity located within the EU Member States or Associated Countries is eligible to access the DICE services free of charge until June 2023. After this date, providers will continue to offer their services as part of their mission, under appropriately agreed conditions of use. Only new users may be considered: that is, those who are not yet using the same data storage offering (for example, through separate funding from national authorities).

Many services provided via DICE are already available in the EOSC portal. In order to apply, users have simply to log in to the EOSC Portal, select their service of interest and submit an order, indicating that it is a DICE request. More services will be made available in the EOSC Portal in the upcoming months.

To learn more and apply visit the Call for Service Requests page