ESA Redu is not just a centre for education in space research, based in the Belgian Ardennes. It is also a European earth observation and solar observation station, and is involved in radio navigation and space cybersecurity.

Last February, our Account Manager Niels Deriemaecker was elected as a member of the Technical Advisory Board of the Research Data Alliance (RDA). We asked him a few questions about the start of this adventure.

The volume of aggregated metadata in the Belnet R&E Federation has grown steadily in recent years. This volume can mean some slowness or unnecessary consumption of bandwidth for your organisation's use of certain SP/IdP. This is why our Services team has set up MDQ service, a system that allows you to easily aggregate metadata specific to an SP/IdP.

The Flemish Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) is a non-profit research institute, with a clear focus on groundbreaking strategic basic research in life sciences and operates in close partnership with the five universities in Flanders. Scientists at VIB conduct pioneering research across a wide spectrum of disciplines ranging from cancer, inflammation and neuroscience to plant biology. To exchange huge amounts of data with the scientists of the different VIB labs and other academic researchers, the organisation makes extensive use of Belnet FileSender. We spoke to Marcus Fislage, Cryo-EM manager at VIB/VUB.

Federal Public Services (FPSs) are connected by Belnet to one another and to the Internet via FedMAN (Federal Metropolitan Area Network). FedMAN is an essential part of the federal government's IT infrastructure and was fully integrated into the Belnet network about 10 years ago. Recently, in line with the rest of the Belnet network, the FedMAN ring has been running entirely on new equipment from Ciena. Tom De Clercq, one of our network architects, explains the benefits of this renewal and how the network team brought this project to a successful conclusion.

Through EOSC Focus, Belnet is deepening its commitment to Open Science and making this more concrete. EOSC stands for European Open Science Cloud. Belnet, through the EOSC Focus project, is an integral part of the EOSC ecosystem and is therefore best placed to inform Belgian knowledge institutions about European developments within EOSC.