Health, safety, and prosperity are wished at the beginning of this new year. These are exceptionally grave times for the many. Armed conflicts, widespread destruction, and the normalization of criminal behavior increasingly coexist with indifference on the part of those who enjoy safety and stability the most, often accompanied by a performative display of concern while betraying in further cruelty. The disjunction between declared values and concrete action is not neutral. It produces harm, accelerates vulnerability, and shortens lives. It also compels a sober reassessment of how collective scientific and educational work is organized, sustained, and protected.
It is in this context, and after further betrayals that have clarified the limits of existing arrangements, that a new start is being undertaken. The Open Science Commons Cloud (OSCC) is a technical and organizational infrastructure currently under construction and scheduled for deployment in the coming weeks. It is introduced independently of prior institutional frameworks. Its purpose is practical: to provide a stable, accountable foundation for rigorous research, education, and international collaboration when established structures have failed to uphold their responsibilities.
This initiative arises from the experience of a COST action that was conceived, developed, and carried to success over more than three years of sustained work, bringing together a large, highly competent network of experts across countries and disciplines, addressing matters of substantial societal relevance. That achievement demonstrated what can be accomplished through methodological rigor, intellectual honesty, and sustained effort. What followed, however, was a debacle. Once leadership and operational responsibility shifted, the material foundations were allowed to disappear through neglect. Allowing core systems to vanish for want of a few tens of euros is not misfortune. It is a breach of duty, rendered particularly severe by the fact that this occurred while harsh fieldwork was being conducted abroad, during a period of only partial recovery from years of daily brutal physical violence, and after profound personal and economic damage had already been inflicted through the hypocrisy and inaction of those who should have intervened to prevent further crimes.
The significance of the OSCC therefore extends beyond infrastructure alone. It is intended to support the reconstruction of a genuinely excellent network, capable of operating globally and sustainably, devoted to the most stringent scientific methods, reproducibility, intellectual honesty, and disciplined hard work for the benefit of societies at large. Such networks cannot rely on declarations, reputational capital, or nominal funding alone. They require reliable technical environments, shared and secure working spaces, continuity of operations, and governance structures that enforce responsibility rather than reward opportunism or indifference.
From a technical standpoint, the platform is anchored in dedicated high performance infrastructure. At its core is an AMD EPYC 7532 system with 32 physical cores and 64 threads, supported by 128 GB of ECC memory, a combination of NVMe and high capacity HDD storage including 3.2 TB of NVMe for low latency workloads, and sustained 10 Gbps network connectivity with monthly transfer capacity in the tens of terabytes. By contemporary academic standards, this constitutes a small but serious computational facility. Its availability at modest cost underscores how unnecessary the earlier losses were, and how feasible continuity becomes when responsibility is taken seriously. We take it from here, with more prowess than before, starting anew.
The OSCC is being deployed under a new sustainability model, explicitly independent of previous arrangements and no longer reliant on the funds obtained through the COST framework, regrettably. It is designed to avoid dependence on unpaid labor, personal financial exposure, or informal assurances. Governance is conceived to be open, transparent, democratic, and ethical, with clearly defined roles, traceable decision making, and financial clarity proportionate to the societal importance of the work being supported. The OSCC will be made available to students, researchers, and educators who lack access to reliable infrastructure, as well as to organizations working in research, education, and public interest domains. Its purpose is to lower structural barriers to participation in high quality scientific and educational work, particularly for those operating in constrained, precarious, or hostile environments. The platform is intended to support collaborative research, open educational resources, shared data practices, and cross border cooperation under conditions that respect methodological rigor, transparency, and ethical responsibility. In this sense, OSCC is not only a technical resource but an enabling environment for building and sustaining a truly excellent network devoted to honest work, reproducible science, and societal benefit, including continued efforts in one health education across disciplines and regions.
We will do our best to regain control of the action as well, to savage the opportunity to make a real difference through our hard earned EU funds. Alongside this efforts and all infrastructure work, I am also preparing a major international online event focused on health and environmental professionals who have faced reprisals, severe harassment, and violence, in different forms and degrees of severity. The aim is to provide a serious, evidence based space in which hundreds of speakers can document and analyze the brutality and cruelty that still prevail in many professional contexts, silencing honest work, destroying careers, and, in the most extreme cases, costing lives. The event is expected to take place online by the end of the year now beginning, or by mid 2027, and will seek to bring visibility, collective analysis, and professional solidarity to issues that remain widely denied or minimized despite their scale and impact. Ours lives are being destroyed with impunity, and with it the chances to speak about even harsher and more brutal crimes affecting our entire societies. We must stay together, prevail, build up strength and enforce true lawful competence from all in positions of responsibility.
Over the coming months, I will focus on rebuilding from safer and more stable ground, with the intention of sharing further updates and, I hope, good news in the next communication. It may not be possible, as we take it from a position of severe lack and vulnerability. I look forward to collaborating with competent, good willed professionals who remain committed to integrity, rigor, and mutual support. The OSCC and the associated initiatives are meant to serve, and I remain available to help where possible. If support or assistance is needed, please do not hesitate to reach out. Further updates, including open courseware of mine, new publications and concrete details on all presented, will be shared in March, with the aim of enabling impactful global action under this new model. The intervening period is being used to recover capacity and to pursue the enforcement of legal protections that remain necessary. In the current climate, rebuilding on sound, honest, and accountable foundations is not an act of optimism. It is a professional and ethical obligation.
Despite the hardships described, I will continue to do my best. I am deeply thankful for the honest support already offered by those who have stood by in good faith. The path forward remains steep and, for now, largely solitary, but this period of pause is necessary to rebuild with greater safety and durability. With that, I again wish all the best, and extend sincere thanks to those who have acted with integrity and care. Thank you all. My very best wishes of health and prosperity.
