On March 29, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) cooperated with the International Science Council (ISC), its Committee on Data (CODATA), and the World Data System (WDS), to organize an open-science symposium: Towards a FAIRer World: Implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science to Address Global Challenges. The event was held both online and in person at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, France, bringing together over 240 researchers, data scientists, policymakers, and other stakeholders from around the world, with a shared objective to promote the global transformation of societies towards open science and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). 

Two thematic sessions were arranged during the one-day symposium, highlighting key topics including data commons for global challenges, and open science and data policy in times of crisis. Representatives from the Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC) initiative were invited to attend the meeting and delivered a speech on Combining Remote Sensing and In-situ Data for the SDGs. The speaker, Professor Jianhui Li, also the Chinese PI of GOSC Initiative with seed funding from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), provided an overview of the development of SDG data infrastructures in China and elaborated on the current efforts on SDG platforms, technologies, and resources, such as the SDG Big Data Platform, SDG Cloud, SDGSAT-1 for SDGs, EarthDataMiner, SDG Workbench, etc. In addition, the progress of the GOSC SDG-13 case study was raised as an essential use case. “Stepping into the post-pandemic era, we will embrace more opportunities for scientific collaboration and alignment to achieve SDGs. By leveraging the existing infrastructure capabilities as well as the global network of GOSC and its International Programme Office (GOSC IPO) supported by CODATA and Computer Network Information Center of the CAS, we aim to engage more international stakeholders and contribute our share to a FAIRer data world”, says Jianhui Li.

The UNESCO symposium offers a great opportunity for GOSC to engage with global open-science efforts. We have seen the enormous potential for open science in accelerating progress toward the achievement of SDGs. Looking forward, GOSC IPO is planning a series of capacity-building and knowledge-sharing activities, such as the 2023 International Training Work on Open Science and SDGs, the International Symposium on Global Open Science Cloud, etc. In line with the UNESCO call for open science, GOSC is dedicated to making the world a better and more sustainable place for everyone. Welcome on board. Welcome to our family! (Xueting LI, Lili ZHANG)

Please stay tuned at: https://bit.ly/3jwZHNg

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