Open Science and Data Management

Cloud4Business operates as an industrial technology SME: the Horizon Europe Open Science obligations (Articles 16-17 and Annex 5 of the Model Grant Agreement) are fulfilled by publishing research outputs as software papers, data papers and Key Exploitable Results (KER) in specialised peer-reviewed journals (SoftwareX, JOSS, Data in Brief, Scientific Data), consistently with its industrial rather than academic role.

1. Open Access Policy

Cloud4Business adopts an immediate Open Access policy for all publications and outputs produced within projects funded with public funds, in compliance with Articles 16-17 and Annex 5 of the Horizon Europe Model Grant Agreement and with the principles of Plan S (cOAlition S, 2018). Long-form text publications, scientific articles, technical reports, working papers and project deliverables made public are released under the Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 licence, which allows reuse, redistribution and adaptation with the sole obligation to correctly cite the authors. Research software is released under standard open-source licences (Apache 2.0, MIT or EUPL) and assigned a Zenodo DOI to guarantee academic citability. The datasets produced are released with licences appropriate to the context (CC-BY 4.0, CC0 where legally possible) and accompanied by FAIR metadata.

Deposit takes place exclusively in accredited repositories: Zenodo (operated by CERN, CoreTrustSeal certified, part of EOSC) for text publications, software, datasets and multimedia materials; GitHub as a collaborative development platform for software, with automatic archiving on Zenodo at each release. The embargo policy applied by Cloud4Business is zero embargo: publications are accessible from the very moment of publication, without restriction periods. Any exceptions, limited to content subject to legitimate intellectual property constraints, commercial confidentiality or protection of personal data, are specifically justified in the project's Data Management Plan and are in any case made accessible in summary form (public metadata, extended abstracts) to ensure the visibility of the work carried out.

2. Data Management

For each research and innovation project, Cloud4Business develops a Data Management Plan (DMP) drafted according to the official Horizon Europe template and maintained as a living document throughout the entire duration of the project, in line with the indications of the European Commission (Horizon Europe Programme Guide) and with the European Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (ALLEA, 2023).

Update milestones

• Month 6, initial version following the first data collection phase, with definition of data types, estimated volumes, metadata standards and access criteria.
• Month 18, intermediate version with any methodological revisions, update of the preservation plan and of the opening/closing criteria of the individual outputs.
• Month 36 (or project end), final version documenting the actual publication and preservation of each output, with assigned DOIs and links to the Zenodo deposits and GitHub repositories.

Metadata standards

The data management infrastructure adopts DataCite metadata for formal citation and Dublin Core for essential bibliographic description, with progressive alignment to the relevant disciplinary schemas: GeoDCAT-AP for geospatial data, INSPIRE for territorial data, Darwin Core for biodiversity data where pertinent, SAREF (ETSI TS 103 264) for IoT/sensor data. All outputs are deposited on Zenodo, part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), with a minimum preservation horizon of ten years following the conclusion of the project.

Protection of personal and sensitive data

The management of personal and sensitive data strictly follows the GDPR (Regulation (EU) 2016/679), supported by the company's ISO/IEC 27001 certified Information Security Management System, with end-to-end tracking of the data lifecycle and anonymisation and pseudonymisation protocols documented in each project's DMP.

3. FAIR Principles for Data

Cloud4Business applies the FAIR principles (Wilkinson et al., 2016, Scientific Data 3:160018, DOI: 10.1038/sdata.2016.18) to all the outputs of its R&I activity.

Findable

• Every output (dataset, software, technical report) is deposited on Zenodo with automatic assignment of a persistent DOI.
• The metadata follow the DataCite Metadata Schema 4.5, including: title, authors with ORCID iD, description, keywords, publication date, resource type, licence, affiliated project.
• Every C4B author is identified by a verified ORCID iD:

Accessible

• Open Access as the default mode for all outputs not covered by intellectual property constraints or commercial confidentiality.
• For datasets containing sensitive data (personal, geolocated environmental, financial): access with a temporal embargo or controlled access (Zenodo restricted access), with metadata always public (“as open as possible, as closed as necessary”).
• Access protocol: HTTPS with the Zenodo REST API (standard, non-proprietary).

Interoperable

• Open, non-proprietary formats: CSV, GeoJSON, JSON-LD, GeoTIFF for datasets; Python/JavaScript for software; Markdown/PDF for documentation.
• Controlled vocabularies and reference ontologies: ETSI SAREF for IoT/sensors, IFC/IDS for BIM data, Dublin Core for general metadata.
• Machine-readable metadata schema deposited together with the data.

Reusable

• Explicit licences for each output (details in section 4).
• Technical documentation (README, data dictionary, API specification) attached to each deposit.
• Data provenance (data lineage) documented: sources, transformations, versions.

4. Deposit and preservation repository

Zenodo (primary repository)

• URL: zenodo.org
• Operator: CERN (Geneva), OpenAIRE infrastructure
• C4B use: Deposit of datasets, software, technical reports and preprints.
• Preservation guarantee: Zenodo guarantees the long-term retention of deposited outputs for at least 20 years (CERN Data Centre). DOIs are managed through DataCite and are persistent and resolvable for an indefinite period.
• Community: C4B deposits are linked to the relevant Zenodo communities (e.g. “EU-funded research”, “Environmental Sciences”, “Construction and Building Technology” where available).

5. Publications and FAIR outputs

Cloud4Business publishes its research outputs on Zenodo, an accredited repository operated by CERN within the European Open Science Cloud, guaranteeing each output a persistent identifier (DOI), FAIR metadata compliant with DataCite, long-term preservation and an open licence according to the principle «as open as possible, as closed as necessary». The following list collects the publications available to date, ordered by category. The publications are signed by the founding partners Stefano Falcone and Maria Emilia Mazzone, in some cases in co-authorship with established research partners (Ingenium Rise S.r.l. for the records relating to Qualiagro 4.0 and to the climate risk scenario simulations).

Software

Dataset

Technical reports and preprints

6. Software Repositories and Open Code

The software developed within Cloud4Business's research and innovation activities is released on GitHub under standard open-source licences (Apache 2.0, MIT or EUPL depending on the application context) and archived on Zenodo to guarantee a persistent, citable and versioned identifier in line with the FAIR for Research Software principles. Versioning is automated through Zenodo↔GitHub webhooks: every official code release produces a new DOI, maintaining full traceability of the software's evolution.

Active repositories

c4b-nbs-pipeline · v0.1.0 · Open-source pipeline for the ingestion and integration of Copernicus Sentinel-1/2 satellite imagery with environmental IoT sensor streams.
GitHub repository: github.com/C4B-AI/c4b-nbs-pipeline
Zenodo DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19278318
Code licence: Apache 2.0
Languages: Python (≥3.10), with dependencies on rasterio, xarray, paho-mqtt, sentinelsat.
Status: active, in development towards version 0.2.0 with extension to LoRaWAN protocols.

For the full technical description of the implementation, see the AI Framework section of the Technologies page.

7. Licences adopted

Cloud4Business adopts a licensing strategy differentiated by output type, balancing maximum openness and protection of intellectual property.

8. Author profiles

Cloud4Business publications are signed by authors holding a persistent ORCID identifier, which guarantees unambiguous attribution, tracking of affiliations over time and interoperability with all the main international scientific repositories. The full profiles of the partners are available on the Team page.

Maria Emilia Mazzone, CEO & Platform Architect

ORCID iD: 0009-0009-2582-9716
Areas of publication: software architectures for complex environments, on-premise AI platforms for environmental monitoring, Earth Observation/IoT integration, software quality (ISO/IEC 25010) and data quality (ISO/IEC 25012).

Stefano Falcone, CTO & R&I Director

ORCID iD: 0009-0006-5686-2058
Areas of publication: governance of European R&I projects, exploitation strategy and business models for Key Exploitable Results, methodological frameworks for the economic assessment of Nature-Based Solutions, alignment with the EU Taxonomy of sustainable activities.