Developing and Evaluating Infrastructure for ERC to Communicate with Data Repositories and Computing Services
Niklas George · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2022
Abstract Nowadays, the results of geographic research and their complexity differ greatly from those in the past. Through technical progress, researchers all over the world have the opportunity to create scientific results based on complex computations run by specially written software, often written by the researchers themselves. This leads to an enormous amount of different software and runtime environments, resulting in approximately as many unique research environments as there are researchers. To still have the opportunity to publish research reproducibly, the 'Executable Research Compendia' (ERC) was developed. An ERC can be uploaded to 'o2r' and executed on an online execution infrastructure. In current state, an ERC runs in an offline sandbox environment, without possibilities to access external services like online data repositories or geospatial computing services. This work extends the concept of ERCs to let them break out of their offline sandbox environment. To still be able to guarantee reproducibility, the access to external services must be restricted to trusted ones by the journals the ERCs are published in. Therefore, a concept was developed to restrict access to external services by applying allow lists to ERCs and assigning them to DNS servers, responsible for applying the lists.