Sustainability lies at the heart of EUDAT’s mission of designing, implementing and offering common data services and infrastructures. However, to date, there is no common vision of what Sustainability for research & e-infrastructures should encompass. The topic of Sustainability will be framed in the overall context of the conference theme, ‘Bringing data Infrastructure to Horizon 2020’. The success of the €77 billion science programme, running from 2014 – 2020 hangs not only on the quality of the research and the depth of collaboration, but also in curating and managing the outputs, to make them widely available and support the creation of knowledge from data. Since most R&D funding occurs at Member State level, this is obviously a topic of broader significance.
Of course, Sustainability has many strands, ranging from ensuring the funding for the maintenance and upgrading of the physical networks and servers, to data storage and curation, and the development of ontologies for annotating data and enabling the integration of data sets – both within and across academic disciplines. It is also necessary to scope future timeframes – does sustainability mean keeping data secure and available for five years, or ten, or longer? The era of big data, the internet of things, the digitisation of biology and the increasing number of large scientific infrastructures in Europe, is leading to the generation of volumes of data that are moving beyond the capacity of physical storage systems. It is transforming the discipline of data management.
In the face of this disruptive change, current approaches to Sustainability are fragmented. Worse, the topic of curation and preservation of digital archives to conserve the data generated by publicly-funded research is frequently overlooked and ignored when grants are awarded. Policy needs to be consistent from the bottom up – from an individual institution, through to national research policy and at a pan-European level.
 

SUSTAINABILITY PLENARY
chaired by Nuala Moran, Managing Editor, Science | Business
15:30 - 16:00 What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Prof. David Rosenthal, Chief Scientist LOCKSS, Stanford University Libraries
The LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program at the Stanford University Libraries has been working to preserve the web-published academic literature and other types of digital content for more than 15 years. What lessons have we learned that apply to the preservation of scientific data?
David S. H. Rosenthal has been an engineer in Silicon Valley for nearly a third of a century, including as a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and employee #4 at NVIDIA. In the second half he has been the Chief Scientist of the LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) Program at the Stanford University Libraries, working to preserve the web-published academic literature.
 
16:00 - 17:30 Panel discussion on how data & e- infrastructures can and should face sustainability challenges going forward

Panel Moderator: Nuala Moran, Managing Editor Science | Business

Nuala manages website editorial content and writes news and features for Science|Business. One of Europe's most experienced science and technology journalists, Nuala was formerly managing editor of Nature, innovation editor of the The Independent on Sunday and deputy editor of Computer Weekly. For the past 14 years she has covered the European biotechnology sector for the US publication BioWorld, and is a contributor to Nature Biotechnology. She has also been a regular contributor to the Financial Times. In 1995 she won the UK Technology Journalist of the year award and in 2006 was named as a Science Journalism Laureate by Purdue University.
The aim of panel discussion is to draw on the expertise of the panel and contributions of the delegates to draw up a short outline/framework that can form the basis for future policy directions.
Rob Baxter, EPCC & EUDAT
Dr Rob Baxter graduated in 1989 with a BSc BSc (1st Class Hons) in Physics/Theoretical Physics from the University of St Andrews.He  then spent a year in Cambridge, doing Part III of the Maths Tripos and falling off punts before coming to the University of Edinburgh in 1990 to join the Particle Physics Theory Group. He completed my PhD in lattice QCD in 1993 and subsequently joined EPCC.He currently co-manages the Software Development Group at EPCC, involved  in commercial and scientific software development and working on projects such as SSI: the UK’s Software Sustainability Institute; ADMIRE: advanced data mining and Internet-scale data integration; Maxwell: how to build a supercomputer out of FPGAs; Condition-based Monitoring, with ITI Techmedia.
Anton Ellenbroek, FAO of the UN, iMarine Board Secretary
Anton Ellenbroek holds an MSc in Biology. He started his career in Surinam growing a.o. orchids. Back in the Netherlands, he joined IUCN-NL and was one of the first to compute ecological footprints. He then furthered his programming skills in several large Oracle projects before joining FAO in 2000. In Rome he contributed to multiple information systems. He worked in several EU-FP7 projects, such as in D4Science-II as FARM Communities Technical Coordinator, and in iMarine as Secretary of the iMarine Board. In iMarine he liaises between the members of the Ecosystem Approach Community of Practice and development teams.
Laurence Field, CERN & CRISP IT & Data Management Leader
Laurence Field is a CERN staff member who has been actively involved in the commissioning of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (WLCG). Over the past ten years he has participated in a number of European projects including the European DataGrid and Enabling Grids for E-science, where he made significant contributions in the area of Grid information systems and interoperations. He is currently the Infrastructure Area Leader for the European Middleware Initiative (covering Information Systems, Messaging Technologies, Accounting and Service Monitoring) and the IT&DM Topic leader for the CRISP project.
Zhiming Zhao, University of Amsterdam & ENVRI
Zhiming Zhao is a researcher in the group of System and Network Engineering (SNE) at University of Amsterdam. He studied in Nanjing Normal University (1989~1993, NJNU), East China Normal University (1993~1996, ECNU) for a bachelor and master degree respectively.  He obtained a Ph.D. (2004) from University of Amsterdam (UvA) and has strong research interests in advanced computing and network technologies, and in utilizing those technologies in different application fields, with particular focus on the subject of e-Science Workflow management systems and network QoS during the past years. Using software agent technologies, he developed an integration framework called the VL-e workflow bus for collaborative computing among different workflows, and tools for network resources selection and provisioning in the context of e-Science workflow. Currently, he is working on the interoperability among different advanced infrastructure for supporting big data applications.
Hans Jørgen Marker, Director of the Swedish National Data Service & DASISH Coordinator
Hans Jørgen Marker is the director of the Swedish National Data Service. Before that employment he worked 25 years for the Danish Data Archive, where he was director for 6 years. He is a member of the board of directors of the Council of Social Science Data Archives, CESSDA, and the coordinator of the cluster project Data Service Infrastructure for Social science and the Humanities, DASISH. Previously he has been president of CESSDA, president of Association of History and Computing and Chairman of the DDI alliance Expert Committee. To begin with he was a historian. In that capacity he has served as the president of the Association for History and Computing, he is also the initiator of the Danish Demographic Database, which is a resource of transcribed historical personal data, primarily census data from the 18th and 19th century.
Stephanie Suhr, EMBL-EBI & Project Manager, BioMedBridges
Stephanie Suhr is the project manager of BioMedBridges, a cluster project funded by the European Commission to promote data interoperability between ten new international research infrastructures in the life sciences. Before joining EMBL-EBI she held a position in science management at the European XFEL, a large physics research infrastructure under construction in Hamburg, Germany, and worked as a project manager for the US Antarctic Program, where she supported science on the two USAP research vessels. She also briefly worked in science publishing and is involved in ELIXIR. Stephanie holds a PhD in oceanography from the University of Southampton.
Alison Kennedy Executive Director (Operations) & Member of the Board of Directors of the PRACE aisbl
Alison has worked at EPCC, the high performance computing and data centre of the University of Edinburgh, for over 20 years. EPCC runs national and local HPC services mainly for the academic research community in the UK, undertakes technology transfer to industry and is very active in large European projects, including PRACE, EUDAT and CRESTA. She was employed initially at EPCC as a Project and Programme Manager of European Commission projects, following a previous career working in industry as a real-time systems programmer, project manager and product manager for a variety of large technology companies. She has undergraduate degrees in History (from the University of Edinburgh) and in Mathematics and Technology (from the Open University) and a post-graduate Business Administration degree (from Heriot-Watt University).
Yannick Legre, EGI.eu Director
Yannick is the director of EGI.eu since February 2014. Formerly he was a senior research engineer at the French National Scientific Research Centre - Grid and Cloud Institute (CNRS-IdGC). He holds a Master of Science in Information Technology (MScIT) and a degree in Law (LL.L). Over the last 15 years, Yannick has been involved in more than 30 projects in the areas of healthcare and biomedical research, as well as biodiversity and environmental research, such as the ENVRI & CReATIVE-B projects. Yannick has also been a co-founder and the president of the international HealthGrid association, and the director for International Relations of a French SME.
Roberto Sabatino, Business Development DANTE & GÉANT
Roberto has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Turin. He has worked in the telecommunications industry and universities (Turin, Cambridge) in various roles including systems administrator, SW developer, researcher. He joined DANTE in July 1997 and has since played a key role in the technical and strategic development of GEANT over the years. More recently his principle focus is working with international scientific users to help them utilise GEANT to its full potential
Paolo Manghi, ISTI CNR & OpenAIRE
He is currently working for the InfraScience research group (formerly D-Lib) led by Dr. Donatella Castelli, part of the Multimedia Networked Information System Laboratory (NeMIS). His research is mainly in the fields of Data Models for Digital Library Management Systems, data curation in Digital Libraries, service-oriented ICT infrastructures with special focus on data ICT infrastructures
Also interested in: database systems, type systems for XML query language correctness, query languages for XML data, XML P2P database systems, applications construction in persistent languages, integration of persistence programming and the World Wide Web.