Governance

Establishment of the infrastructure
It is planned to organize the EPOS governance structure with the following bodies:

EPOS will provide a common management structure to secure data provision. The EPOS Provider's & User's commission will support the management of the RI to promote open access to all the interested users and will propose the opening of specific calls to evaluate proposals based on their quality. The EPOS Board will promote the participation of other countries not included in this initial proposal as well as will consider proposals to join EPOS guaranteeing open and transparent access mechanisms.

In the establishment of the RI, four phases have been envisaged each one covering specific activities and having its governance structure. The four phases are:

Conception phase
This phase has matured since the mid-80s of the last century when digital broadband seismology effectively started and Europe then leading in this field, promoted establishment of ORFEUS as research high-quality data facility for seismology. In the early years of the third millennium infrastructure projects like MEREDIAN and NERIES for seismology, EXPLORIS and VOLUME for volcanological research were conceived, proposed and then successfully funded by the EU through the most recent FPs. Furthermore, OneGeology has been proposed at global scale. All this evidences that EPOS is a mature extension and follow-up of these earlier activities.

Preparatory phase
In order to have EPOS come into being after the conception phase and to the goal of proceeding thoroughly toward its firm establishment, it has been envisaged the formation of an Inter-Activity preparatory council (IAPC) which will act as preliminary executive board, and oversee the different working groups. The latter groups will in fact make recommendations toward implementation of the activities. Establishment of IAPC is essential in order to step forward and accomplish the preparatory phase. Representatives from each Member State supporting EPOS will appoint the IAPC and both expert scientists and administrators will constitute it. This will ensure participation and coordination between the main public research institutes in Europe. For specific issues, it might be useful to have a representative of the main projects constituting the EPOS conception phase (NERIES, SPICE, EXPLORIS, etc ...) participating and supporting the IAPC activities. The main duties of IAPC can be summarized as follows: Working Groups will be established based on the main components of EPOS; they are expected to provide their conclusions and recommendations within one year from their installation.
The following WGs will be formed. The preparatory phase ends when the recommendations of the WGs are provided. Concurrently an international meeting will be organized to present and discuss the preliminary decisions taken by IAPC on the basis of the advice provided by the WGs. At the meeting the proper decision making structure of EPOS, which involves the Board, the Council and the Commission (EPOS providers' and users' platform commission) will be determined. The council becomes responsible for designing the infrastructure strategies and the operations and to report to the Board that will carry it out in practice. Moreover, within this phase we are planning to develop some prototypes for the e-infrastructure components, which can be essential to direct the work plan during the construction phase.

Construction phase
This phase sees the EPOS Board, which has the financial mandate, to actuate the plan provided by the Council. The Board will set up a legal entity, hosted by one of the existing scientific organizations, in charge of running the infrastructure operations. The legal entity will respond to the board and have the following main duties to fulfil.

Testing and operational phase
The service to the user community will start in the construction phase. From experiences in the cited projects this is the best way to test the facility and improve its "modus operandi". The testing will be performed through the adherence to user protocols proposed jointly by the Council and the Commission. Also, an external and international commission appointed by the Council will review testing. As soon as the testing phase is completed the RI activities will be re-organized within operational and developmental branches. Finally, the Commission acts as advisory board for the users' requirements.

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