EOSC
The draft EOSC partnership proposal, one of the about 50 proposed European Partnerships under Horizon Europe, has now been published. It aims to deploy and consolidate by 2030 an open, trusted, virtual, federated environment in Europe to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines and provide access to rich array of related services. The Partnership will bring together institutional, national and European initiatives and engage all relevant stakeholders to jointly design and deploy EOSC, based on science commons where data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR) and where research-enabling and other services are made available throughout Europe. This European contribution to a “Web of FAIR Data and Related Services for Science” will enhance the possibilities for researchers to find, share and reuse publications, data, and software and develop and access a service ecosystem, boosting the research capacity and innovation potential of Europe.
Next steps
As the mandate of the current interim EOSC governance will come to an end on 31 December 2020, a new legal entity, the EOSC Association, is expected to be set up later this year to represent European stakeholders in a collective manner. It will be the party to enter into a contractual arrangement with the European Commission under the European partnership. The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of the Partnership will be available for public consultation this summer. All organisations interested to join the Association, and hence be fully involved in developing EOSC jointly in Europe over the coming years, are invited to express their interest trough this registry. Further details on the process of joining the Association at this initial stage can be found in this blogpost from Cathrin Stöver, EOSC Executive Board Co-chair.
Once the EOSC Association has been established - and provided the proposed Partnership will be assessed positively against the selection criteria by the European Commission - a Memorandum of Understanding will be signed between the EOSC Association and the European Commission to officially launch the EOSC partnership at the end of 2020.
Background
Supporting the EU policy of Open Science, EOSC aims to give the EU a global lead in research data management by providing European science, industry and public authorities with:
- world-class data infrastructure to store and manage data
- high-speed connectivity to transport data
- powerful high performance computers to process data.
The EOSC portal, launched in November 2018 and funded from the Horizon 2020 programme, provides universal access channel to EOSC services and resources. Through the portal, researchers and professionals can access open and seamless services, data and other resources from a wide range of national, regional and institutional public research infrastructures across Europe. The portal facilitates interoperability of datasets and tools from different providers, and enables researchers to perform their work more quickly and disseminate their research results more widely. It already covers a wide range of disciplines (e.g. medical and health, natural sciences, physics, earth sciences, arts, humanities, agriculture, and engineering).