OneSciencePlace: Where Science Meets Seamless Cyberinfrastructure
OneSciencePlace® is a modern, extensible, and fully managed and composable platform to deliver HPC portal, science gateway, data sharing hub, publication repository, and dynamic research website through an intuitive, low-code/no-code environment.
Designed to serve the full spectrum of the research ecosystem, OneSciencePlace empowers principal investigators, educators, research teams, HPC administrators, and institutional stakeholders alike. Whether supporting a single user, a classroom, a collaborative research group, or a campus-wide initiative, the platform scales effortlessly to meet diverse needs.
At its core, everything on OneSciencePlace is content, including applications, data, publications, and tools, making it easy to curate, present, and extend scientific resources. With built-in FAIRness (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and seamless integration across computational and storage backends (on-premises or cloud), OneSciencePlace transforms how cyberinfrastructure is delivered at a fraction of the cost and with minimal administrative burden.
Apps – A Custom App Store for Research & Education
OneSciencePlace includes a powerful, extensible App framework that transforms how computational tools are deployed, shared, and reused.
🛒 Custom App Store: Organize and publish your own branded App Store featuring domain-specific tools and workflows, tailored to your community or research area.
⚡ One-Click App Launch: Deliver applications effortlessly—whether interactive web apps (e.g., Jupyter), native GUI apps (e.g., MATLAB), or HPC batch jobs (serial, distributed, or parallel)—with a single click.
🧩 No-Code UI Builder: Create intuitive, web-based interfaces for your Apps using low-code/no-code configuration. Built-in input validation ensures usability and correctness without any custom development.
📦 Bring-Your-Own-App (BYOA): Let users contribute and deploy their own applications, containers, or scripts with minimal configuration—enabling grassroots innovation and local autonomy.
📚 FAIR Publishing: Publish Apps, workflows, and their results as reproducible, citable digital objects—complete with metadata, persistent identifiers, and reuse-ready packaging.
Compute Integration – Flexible, Scalable, and Location-Agnostic
OneSciencePlace offers seamless integration with a wide range of compute environments, giving users powerful and flexible execution options.
🌐 Universal Compute Connectivity: Integrate any compute cluster or standalone Linux host—on-premises, in the cloud, or hybrid. OneSciencePlace adapts to your infrastructure, not the other way around.
➰ Flexible Runtime Configuration: Define application runtimes as Docker containers, Apptainer/Singularity images, simple executable scripts or complex binaries to support everything from lightweight tools to full-scale HPC jobs.
👥 Account-Based Orchestration: Execute jobs using individual user credentials for fine-grained access control, or fixed service accounts for streamlined workflows and team-based operations.
⚙️ Backend-Agnostic Job Management: Whether using Slurm, or no scheduler at all, OneSciencePlace abstracts job submission and management, allowing users and stakeholders to focus on science, not infrastructure.
📈 Scalable and Elastic: Dynamically scale workloads based on usage patterns—ideal for research groups, institutions, or classroom deployments that vary over time.
🔐 Secure and Auditable: All compute interactions are authenticated, authorized, and logged. Integrate with campus identity systems and maintain full oversight of job execution and resource use.
Data Sharing - Powerful and contextual
OneSciencePlace makes data sharing seamless, collaborative, and deeply integrated into the research lifecycle.
🔐 Built-In, Granular Sharing Controls: Share datasets with individuals, groups, or the public using fine-grained access controls—no separate tools or platforms needed.
📝 Annotate and Discuss in Context: Add rich metadata, notes, and comments directly on data assets. Enable collaborative review, discussion, and refinement without leaving the platform.
📊 Custom Visualization and Display Plugins: Extend data interaction with tailored plugins for your data types—whether tabular, geospatial, genomic, image-based, or simulation output—making interpretation and communication effortless.
FAIR Publishing – Publish and Preserve Research to amplify impact
OneSciencePlace provides a robust framework for sharing and preserving scholarly outputs in compliance with FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable).
📚 Open Access Repository: Create a fully functional, customizable open-access repository to publish and preserve a wide range of scholarly materials—articles, reports, datasets, notebooks, Apps, and more.
🧾 Rich, Configurable Metadata: Use built-in metadata standards out of the box or tailor schemas to suit disciplinary or institutional requirements—ensuring discoverability and alignment with best practices.
📍 Persistent Identifiers: Assign DOIs, Handles, or ARKs to ensure permanent citation and reliable referencing of published content.
❯❯❯❯ Multistage Curation Workflow: Implement a flexible publication pipeline supporting draft, review, revision, and finalization stages. Track progress, manage contributions, and enable quality control with ease.
🧑 Self-Service Contributions: Empower users to submit and manage their own scholarly outputs through a guided, customizable workflow—lowering barriers to participation while maintaining editorial standards.
⏳ Embargo and Access Control: Configure embargo periods, access restrictions, or delayed release to align with funding policies, intellectual property concerns, or collaborative agreements.
Identify and access management – Secure, Flexible, and Federated
OneSciencePlace offers robust and adaptable identity and access management to support diverse organizational needs.
🔐 Flexible Authentication Options: Integrate with campus LDAP, SSO systems (e.g., Shibboleth, SAML, CAS), or use standard web accounts—supporting both institutional and public access.
🌐 Federated Identity Support: Enable seamless access through federated identity providers (e.g., InCommon, CILogon, Globus Auth), allowing users to authenticate with credentials from their home institutions.
👥 Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Assign permissions based on roles (e.g., admin, contributor, reviewer, viewer) to manage access to apps, data, and content across teams and projects.
🚧 Built-In User and Group Management: Organize users into groups with delegated administration and tailored privileges. Manage memberships and permissions directly within the platform.
🕵🏻 Auditable and Secure: All access and actions are logged for accountability and compliance, supporting secure collaboration and data governance.
Content management system (CMS) – Powerful, Flexible, and Feature-Rich
OneSciencePlace is built on Drupal, a leading enterprise-grade CMS, providing a rich foundation for creating, managing, and delivering dynamic scientific content:
📰 Full-Spectrum Content Publishing: Easily host and organize documentation, announcements, training materials, videos, tutorials, event listings, and community features—all in one place.
🎨 Fully Customizable Design: Tailor the look, feel, and structure of your site to reflect your project's identity. Create branded research portals with custom navigation, layouts, and user experiences.
🧩 Modular and Extensible: Leverage a vast ecosystem of plugins and modules to add new functionality—from interactive forms and media galleries to forums and analytics tools.
🔌 Seamless Integration: Integrate your content with computational apps, data repositories, publication workflows, and user dashboards for a unified digital research environment.
Fully Managed, Secure & Extensible – Hassle-Free by Design
OneSciencePlace is built for rapid deployment, institutional alignment, and long-term adaptability—with minimal administrative overhead.
✅ No Backend Management Required: Each instance or site is delivered as a fully managed, secure instance—professionally hosted and maintained, so your team can focus on research, not infrastructure.
🌐 Federated Identity Ready: Out-of-the-box support for institutional SSO systems, including LDAP, InCommon, CILogon, and Globus Auth, ensures seamless access for users with existing credentials.
𓏠 Modular and Extensible Architecture: Combine only the components you need—apps, data, compute, publications, and more. Easily extend functionality with plugins, APIs, and custom modules to meet evolving research goals.
↗ Scalable from Prototype to Production: Whether you’re supporting a small research group or an entire institution, OneSciencePlace grows with your needs—securely and efficiently.
Scalable for Any Size or Scope – From Individual to Thousands of users
OneSciencePlace is designed to grow and adapt seamlessly to your evolving research and organizational needs, with flexible deployment options tailored to your scale.
👤 Single Users: Ideal for individual researchers seeking a personal science portal, HPC access gateway, or a dedicated space to publish and share data.
👥 Small to Mid-Size Research Groups: Enable collaborative development of shared apps, reusable workflows, and secure data repositories. Simplify onboarding and preserve institutional knowledge by building on prior contributions.
🏢 Departments & Institutes: Support large academic units with advanced role-based access control, custom branding, and deep integration with institutional infrastructure such as SSO, HPC clusters, and storage systems.
🌐 Cross-Institutional & National Collaborations: Facilitate federated user access and integrate distributed HPC resources, data sharing, and FAIR-compliant publishing to enable large-scale, multi-institutional research projects.
Benefits
Use cases
- HPC portal or Compute/Cloud portal is a web-based interface that provides users (especially researchers, educators, and students) with a simplified, secure, and accessible way to run applications and manage data on one or more integrated systems such as HPC clusters or servers. These resources may be either on-premises /or in the cloud. Typical applications deployed on such portals include terminal, simple data browser, Jupyter, RStudio, and MATLAB.
- Science Gateway is a web-based platform that provides scientists, researchers, educators, and students with easy access to advanced computational tools, data, and scholarly content without requiring them to be programming or HPC systems experts. Science gateways typically focus on a specific discipline and curate typical applications, data, and scholarly content. They may also include newsletters, forums, events, and other elements for community building and sustenance.
- File sharing or Data sharing is designed to help research teams manage, share, and collaborate on data by providing a web-based platform that integrates data organization, metadata annotation, visualization, and discussion tools.
- Content Repository is a system with predefined and structured metadata to publish and share scholarly content: Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). To enhance discovery, content can be assigned a persistent identifier such as a DOI, Handle, or ARK. User-contributed content can be published using an editorial process to ensure high quality.