Open infrastructure is one of the vital components within open science (UNESCO,2020). By harnessing the most advanced research facilities and software, open infrastructure is to handle those massive cross-disciplinary research resources. There’re already many e-infrastructures around the world, notably the European Open Science Cloud from the European Commission, New Digital Research Infrastructure Organization in Canada, the CSTCloud from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the ARDC e-infrastructure in Australia, XSEDE and other research e-infrastructure related initiatives in the US, the African Open Science Platform, etc.

Among all of these notable research e-infrastructures, we see the great potentials by better connectivity and interoperability between each other. What if we can have an open science cloud connecting more and more existing research facilities around the globe? The idea of a Global Open Science Cloud (GOSC) was initiated during the CODATA 2019 Beijing conference. The mission of GOSC is to interconnect different institutional, national and regional open science clouds and platforms to create a global virtual environment for globalized research and innovation. It aims to provide better ways to fully harness the global scientific research resources, and to help bridge the divide in infrastructure, technique, and capacity building among different countries, regions, and institutions.