Our Mission

The Open Commons Consortium (OCC) manages and operates cloud computing, data commons, and data ecosystems to advance scientific, medical, health care and environmental research for human and societal impact.

The OCC provides: i) the consortium and project management; ii) the legal agreements and governance structure; iii) manages and operates the cloud computing infrastructure; and iv) manages the security and compliance required.  

The OCC is a division of the Center for Computational Science Research Inc. (CCSR), a Chicago based 501(c)(3) not-for-profit that supports analytic, scientific, biomedical, and environmental research and applications. 

The open commons consortium (occ):

  • The OCC manages and operates data commons for the research and development community.

  • Develops and operates framework services so that a research community can develop and operate a data ecosystem containing data commons, data platforms, and data resources and a collection of applications over them.

  • Contributes to the Data GUID community (dataguids.org), including the long term commitment of maintenance and persistence infrastructure of a resolution system for data GUID. Data GUID provide persistent data identifiers for data.

  • Provides a governance framework so that a community of stakeholders can develop and operate a data commons or data ecosystems.

  • Sponsors workshops and other events related to data commons, data platforms and data ecosystems.

  • The OCC participates in working groups that develop and operate a number of data platforms, including:

    • The BloodPAC Data Commons (occ-data.org)

    • The OCC Environmental Data Commons (edc.occ-data.org)

    • The BRAIN Commons (www.braincommons.org)

    • The Veterans Precision Oncology Data Commons (vpodc.org)