Toward a Spanish SKA Regional Centre fully engaged with open science

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.The Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO) will build the most sensitive radio telescopes on Earth. To address fundamental questions in astrophysics, fundamental physics, and astrobiology, it will require processing and handling complex and extremely massive data close to the exascale, hence constituting a technological challenge for the next decade. Approximately 600 Peta-bytes (PB) of calibrated data will be delivered to the network of SKA Regional Centers (SRCs) worldwide. As a world-leading scientific instrument, SKAO aims to pursue the best practices in scientific methodology. Remarkably, it includes the reproducibility of its data as a metric of success. We present the Spanish prototype of an SRC (SPSRC), which supports preparatory scientific activities for the future SKA projects. These include science with SKA precursors and pathfinders while promoting Open Science practices as a way to enable scientific reproducibility. We describe the key developments and components of the SPSRC that align with these objectives. In particular, we describe the performed work on hardware and cloud computing infrastructure, science archive, software and services, user support and training, and collaboration with other SRCs. The resulting SPSRC platform is flexible enough to host heterogeneous projects while being scalable toward the demanding SKA requirements. © The Authors. Published by SPIE.We acknowledge financial support from the State Agency for Research of the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities through the “Center of Excellence Severo Ochoa” awarded to the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (SEV-2017-0709) and from the Grant no. RTI2018-096228-B-C31 (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities/State Agency for Research/European Regional Development Funds, European Union). In addition, we acknowledge financial support from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the European Regional Development Funds (EQC2019-005707-P) and the Regional Government of Andalusia (SOMM17-5208-IAA-2017). LVM, JG, SSE and SLV acknowledge The European Science Cluster of Astronomy and Particle Physics ESFRI Research Infrastructures project that has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement No. 824064. We would like to explicitly acknowledge Dr. José Ruedas, head of the Computer Centre at IAA-CSIC, for his technical assistance. We acknowledge the contribution from Theresa Wiegert. LVM, SSE, and SLV acknowledge financial support from the Grant No. COOPB20448 (Spanish National Research Council Program of Scientific Cooperation for Development i-COOP+2019). LVM, JG, and JM acknowledge financial support from the Grant No. RED2018-102587-T (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities/State Agency for Research). LVM, JG, SSE, JM acknowledge financial support from the Grant No. IAA4SKA P18-RT-3082 (Regional Government of Andalusia). LVM acknowledges financial support from the Ministry of Science and Innovation, from the budgetary line 28.06.000x.430.09 of the General State Budgets of 2021, for the coordination of the participation in SKA-SPAIN. LD acknowledges financial support from the Grant No. PTA2018-015980-I (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and the Spanish National Research Council). MP acknowledges financial support from the Grant No. 54A Scientific Research and Innovation Program (Regional Council of Economy, Knowledge, Business and Universities, Regional Government of Andalusia and the European Regional Development Funds 2014-2020, program D1113102E3).Peer reviewe