Open Science in the Cloud: The CloudFAIR Architecture for FAIR-compliant Repositories.

Fulfilling the FAIR Principles is a challenge that requires the management of research data and metadata considering the inherent big data complexity of volume, variety, and velocity. A suitable solution to deal with this problem is to combine a software reference architecture with a cloud computing environment. In this paper, we propose Cloud-FAIR, a novel Open Science architecture with an infrastructure located entirely in the cloud, which unburdens scientists in data and metadata management and improves performance. CloudFAIR also addresses security issues related to data encryption. We conducted performance tests with a real-world dataset to assess the efficiency of CloudFAIR. Compared to BigFAIR, the proposed architecture provided performance gains that ranged from 41.03% up to 75.95% when the issued queries required the retrieval of both data and metadata.