Report of the second period of virtual access

SLICES-RI is a strategic asset facilitating innovation and knowledge advancement across the domain of digital sciences. The final goal of SLICES is to provide researchers with advanced tools and resources that go beyond individual or institutional capacities and promote collaboration, community-building and the application of scientific standards. SLICES Virtual Access (VA) services enable scientists to use these essential resources without the necessity of being physically present. SLICES-SC project has as objectives the definition of a common framework for VA services, the initial implementation of VA services by leveraging up by the experience from the Open Calls Experiments, the Transnational Access (TA) services, the deployment of Blueprint services, the training of users and the local activities of the distributed SLICES legacy testbeds. This fruitful experience led us to learn and highlight the implications of the operational processes and the dynamics of iteration between the infrastructure and the user communities. It is important to note that for most, only transnational access to the physical infrastructure was provided and that little experience existed on virtual access. We have identified advantages, obstacles, best-practices, strategies and recommendations to navigate and mitigate the challenges to be faced by VA services in the future implementation and operation phases. This document includes a report on the activities conducted to develop SLICES VA services during the second period of the project. This report includes an analysis of the VA services and tools initially created during the first period and based on datasets repositories, tools (reproducibility and visualization) and the initial seed on the contribution to a new standardization on a common metadata framework named Metadata Registry System (MRS) and SLICES Fair Digital Object (MRS/SFDO). This report also includes lesson learned by the locally distributed test-beds and the experience on running open calls from experiments in relation with the definition, provisioning and impact on the research infrastructure of the future SLICES VA services.