FAIR4fusion is  a research and training programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No 847612 which aims at demonstrating and promoting FAIR data access for experimental data across the fusion community, with a long term goal of making data 'as open as possible, as closed as necessary'.  This will be done through recommendations on policy harmonisation, gathering user requirements, developing demonstrators to encourage more feedback and the development of a blueprint architecture for a fully funded implementation and ongoing support programme, to include non experimental data (modelling and simulation) and linking this data to publications.

The European fusion community has become increasingly collaborative over the last few decades with more experimental devices becoming available for broader groups of researchers. The diversity of devices is a great strength of the programme, but as each facility largely has developed their own data technologies, philosophies and access methodologies it has in some cases also presented challenges in sharing data even between collaborating scientists.

Opening the data up and making them more easily available on a pan-European basis is a key ingredient in exploiting the investments in the research infrastructures made so far. 

The overall objective of this work is to make European funded data more widely available to the fusion community, other science communities, funding bodies, and the public at large in order to maximise the impact of, the data and demonstrate the importance of the work done at relevant sites. 

We aim in this proposal to achieve all of the goals specified in this call by not only providing a reference architecture for such an open data platform, but to both demonstrate and elicit feedback from existing users within the fusion domain, to ensure they are both exposed to the benefits of such an open science approach and that we are able to obtain feedback to provide input into the design.  We will also demonstrate these tools to other communities involved in open data initiatives (such as EOSC partners) to gain insight based on their existing experience.