European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

Supporting the EU’s Policy of Open Science, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to give the EU a global lead in research data management and ensure that European scientists enjoy the full benefits of data-driven science.

EOSC is also part of the European Data Strategy, aiming to make the EU a leader in a data-driven society. It will provide seamless access and reliable re-use of research data to European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens through a trusted and open distributed data environment and related interoperable services.

The priorities for building EOSC are set jointly by the European Commission and the EOSC Association through the co-programmed European Partnership (the EOSC Partnership) in the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). Horizon Europe continues to support building EOSC on basis of the baseline that started in the Horizon 2020 programme.

The EOSC Core and Exchange services, including the EOSC Portal front office, have been developed by a series of flagship research and innovation actions funded under the INFRAEOSC destination of the Horizon Europe Work Programme for Research Infrastructures, lately consolidated under the EOSC Future project. Horizon Europe keeps funding the development of the next generation of EOSC functionalities and services while also providing a fully operational EOSC infrastructure node (referred as the EOSC EU Node) in production as the result of the public procurement action launched in 2022. 

EOSC Infrastructure Node through Public Procurement

To capitalise on the considerable research and innovation effort, a fully operational enabling infrastructure node for EOSC has been procured by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe, Research Infrastructures, Work Programme 2021-2022 provisions.

Details of the public procurement action

The managed services of the EOSC EU Node constitute a European level multi-disciplinary and multi-national scientific data/service portfolio for all research users and citizen scientists. Until 2027, the minimum viable services are owned by the EC and governed by the EOSC Tripartite Governance (European Commission, EOSC Association, and Member States/Associated Countries representatives). The future ownership is under discussion with the stakeholders.

In particular, the procured EOSC EU Node has the following value propositions: 

• Facilitates the creation of the “Web of FAIR data and interoperable services” (referred as the EOSC Federation) under the Open Science Policy.
• Puts a “seed in the ground” by operationalizing the first recognised EOSC Node at the European level for the initial 3 years of service duration.
• Offers core services for scientific research infrastructures to federate (i.e., EOSC Core services such as: single-sign-on, catalogues, knowledge graph, application workflow, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk) and common horizontal services for end-users to benefit from (i.e., EOSC Exchange services such as: compute, containers, data transfer, notebooks, file sharing, open research data).
• Defines the pathway and blueprint (i.e., EOSC Architecture and Interoperability Framework) for other potential EOSC Node operators to join the federation.

The EOSC EU Node has an open concept and is only the first node of the federation. National, regional and/or thematic service providers as well as autonomous EOSC Nodes can connect to the federation via the established interoperability frameworks and policies. The Simpl (Smart Middleware) Agent proxy implementation ensures connectivity to other industrial Data Spaces. EuroHPC resources may also be offered to the EOSC Federation.

Background

The Commission intends to unlock the reuse potential of different types of data and facilitate its free flow across borders to achieve a European digital single market, for the benefit of the economy and society.

EOSC is a fundamental enabler of open science and of the digital transformation of science. It offers the possibility to access and reuse all publicly funded research data in Europe, across scientific disciplines and countries. By federating existing research data infrastructures, EOSC leverages national investments and adds value in terms of scale, interdisciplinarity and faster innovation.