European Research Science Cloud
European Research Science Cloud (EOSC) is the European web of FAIR data and related services for research. Central to this web is the deployment of a trusted, virtual federation of existing European infrastructures to store, share and reuse FAIR research outputs across borders and scientific disciplines, also called the EOSC Federation. The EOSC's ambition is to federate existing data, research and e-infrastructure nodes to make them all available to European researchers across borders and disciplines. The federation will provide coordinated entry points primarily for researchers in Europe (EOSC Nodes) to find and access FAIR data and interoperable services that address elements of the whole research cycle (from discovery and mining to storage, management, analysis, publication, and re-use).
EOSC was initiated by the European Commission in 2016 as a project aimed at building a competitive economy based on knowledge (and access to data) by developing an infrastructure that provides its users with services that promote open science practices in Europe.
The European Commission provided financial support for implementing the EOSC through projects under the Horizon 2020 EU Research and Innovation Framework Program. From 2021 to 2027, financial support is provided under the Horizon Europe Program.
The document used to define the overall framework for future research, development and innovation activities in relation to the EOSC is the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). This framework will be further developed in the context of the EOSC Partnership, drawing on inputs from EOSC Association member organisations and Task Forces. The current version of the SRIA was finalised in December 2023.
One of the sections of the SRIA is The Multi-Annual Roadmap (MAR). The EOSC Association periodically updates the MAR to devise a set of priority actions and outcomes, and then, following the membership consultation, a final version of the MAR is agreed upon with the European Commission. Currently, the MAR is set up for the 2025-2027 period.
- Support the implementation of aligned European curricula for data stewardship and encourage the inclusion of these as a core element in research programmes; the establishment of proper career paths for research support professionals is also needed.
- Establish the cost of data management, data stewardship, maintenance and preservation of research outputs as eligible within national funding schemes.
- Leverage existing national Competence Centres and strengthen their participation in coordination networks.
- Promote and sustain the use of PIDs that are already common practice; incentivise sage of PID technologies being developed in EOSC.
- Support and incentivise the use, maintenance and adoption of open standards and APIs to enable resource composability and to achieve interoperability across communities, including in the private sector.
- National policymakers should work with Research Infrastructures, e-infrastructures and national service providers to establish and operate national or regional EOSC support structures to accelerate the integration with EOSC with regards to the provision as well as usage of data and services.
- Encourage national policymakers to review and adjust national policies and regulations to enable services to be used in a cross-border context and engage in a series of in-depth trials to evaluate the utility of proposed resourcing models to agree on approaches for EOSC.
- Acknowledge European and domain-specific semantic artefact catalogues in national infrastructures and guidelines.
- Support repositories to become machine-actionable for greater reuse of content via funding programmes and technical support actions (2025).
EOSC Association
The EOSC Association was set up in July 2020 as an international non-profit organisation under Belgian law to provide a voice for advocacy and representation for the broader EOSC stakeholder community. In 2023, the Association is comprised of 142 Members and 85 Observers.
The Gdańsk University of Technology has been a Member of the EOSC Association since September 2020.
Each Member State or Associated Country with one or more organisations that are Members of the Association may appoint one Member to act as its Mandated Organisation to represent national interests.
In Poland, the Mandated Organisation with the EOSC Association is the National Science Centre (NCN).