CyVerse Austria—A Local, Collaborative Cyberinfrastructure

Life sciences (LS) are advanced in research data management, since LS have established disciplinary tools for data archiving as well as metadata standards for data reuse. However, there is a lack of tools supporting the active research process in terms of data management and data analytics. This leads to tedious and demanding work to ensure that research data before and after publication are FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) and that analyses are reproducible. The initiative CyVerse US from the University of Arizona, US, supports all processes from data generation, management, sharing and collaboration to analytics. Within the presented project, we deployed an independent instance of CyVerse in Graz, Austria (CAT) in frame of the BioTechMed association. CAT helped to enhance and simplify collaborations between the three main universities in Graz. Presuming steps were (i) creating a distributed computational and data management architecture (iRODS-based), (ii) identifying and incorporating relevant data from researchers in LS and (iii) identifying and hosting relevant tools, including analytics software to ensure reproducible analytics using Docker technology for the researchers taking part in the initiative. This initiative supports research-related processes, including data management and analytics for LS researchers. It also holds the potential to serve other disciplines and provides potential for Austrian universities to integrate their infrastructure in the European Open Science Cloud.