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EOSC Support Office Austria!

We, EOSC Austria, strive for a coordinated development of the Austrian Open Science Policy and European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) goals

The EOSC Support Office Austria (EOSC SOA) supports ACONET, which is the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organization, and all Austrian research institutions. The goal of EOSC SOA is to realize the EOSC vision: a federated, multi-disciplinary environment to find and use data, tools, and services for research, innovation, and education.

On this website, you will find comprehensive information about EOSC and the EOSC Association, detailing initiatives, developments, and events among the Austrian research, research support, and cultural heritage communities.

EOSC Support Office Austria Materials
EOSC Node Austria: FAQs
What is EOSC?
EOSC Services

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The vision of Open Science is to make scientific processes more open and effective and to use both scientific excellence and open innovative and applied research to address current challenges, which are very comprehensively outlined in the policies of the EU Commission and in the framework of the Global Sustainability Goals (UN SDGs).

The Austrian initiative drives the commitment to the Open Science movement as well as to the Vienna Declaration on the EOSC.

News

EOSC Node Austria: FAQs

How does the work of EOSC fit into the framework of the common European data spaces initiative?
  • The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) functions as the transverse Common European Data Space for Research and Innovation. It connects independent data repositories, national networks, and thematic infrastructures across Europe into a single federated “system of systems”. This setup lets researchers find, share, and reuse FAIR data, tools, and services.
  • Core Goals
    • Open Science: Make research outputs easy to discover and reuse.
    • FAIR Principles: Ensure data is findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable.
  • Federated Nodes: Connect European, national, and thematic nodes without a single, central owner.
  • Key Features
    • Cross-Border Access: Links different scientific fields and national borders.
    • EOSC Federation: Built on a growing network of operational Nodes, including the baseline EOSC EU Node.
  • Data Integration: Links with other sectoral data spaces, such as health or cultural heritage; in practice, this raises questions of metadata standards, interoperability, access, etc.
Can a service be onboarded via multiple nodes, for example national and thematic nodes?
  • Yes, service providers can onboard services through multiple nodes. The EOSC Federation operates as a distributed network of peer-to-peer thematic, national, and e-infrastructure Nodes alongside the operational EOSC EU Node. Providers can choose their preferred compliant Node for onboarding while remaining discoverable across the entire federation.
  • How Multi-Node Onboarding Works
    • Choice of Gateway: Providers select a preferred national, regional, or thematic Node that matches their technical or geographical domain.
    • Federated Discovery: Once registered via a specific Node, metadata and resources automatically synchronize so users across the entire EOSC Architecture can find them.
  • Compliance: Nodes operate autonomously but must follow shared federation-wide policies on interoperability, AAI, and security.
  • In principle, once a service is onboarded via one Node, it will ipso facto be available via the entire Federation (with Nodes acting as entry points), so there is no need to onboard a service via more than one Node.
  • Is there any preference? Choice of gateway – providers select a preferred national, regional, thematic or e-Infrastructure Node that matches their (technical and/or geographical) domain.
Does EOSC SOA already have specific Austrian services in mind to onboard to the EOSC Federation, in view of the process of submitting the project charter and establishing the Austrian EOSC Node?
  • OKMaps: Open Knowledge Maps is the world’s largest AI-based search engine for scientific knowledge. We dramatically increase the visibility of research findings for science and society alike. OKMaps are a charitable non-profit organization based on the principles of open science. Their aim is to create an inclusive, sustainable and equitable infrastructure that can be used by anyone. Organizations are invited to become supporting members and co-create the platform with us.
  • iMooX offers freely accessible and openly licensed online courses (MOOCs, Massive Open Online Courses) on a variety of topics. All courses are available free of charge, anytime, anywhere. Their goal is to make university-level educational content accessible to a broad section of the population and to give as many people as possible the opportunity to further their education.
Is the idea that the Austrian National EOSC Node onboards only services of interest to the wider EOSC community? Or is the expectation that National Nodes should preferentially onboard services with national scope?
  • Under the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation architecture, a national node should onboard services with a national scope, rather than filtering for EOSC community interest. The division of labor within the EOSC Federation ensures that different types of nodes handle different scales of scientific resource management:
  • The Core Policy Division
    • According to the official EOSC EU Node Resources and Services Onboarding Policy, services directly onboarding to the central EU Node must be multi-country and multi-disciplinary, providing clear added value to the broader European ecosystem.
    • The same policy states that services with a narrower, localized, or domain-specific scope must pursue onboarding through an appropriate National or Thematic Node.
  • National nodes (such as EOSC Node Germany or EOSC Node Sweden) serve as the primary gateways to translate, aggregate, and connect national infrastructures directly to the overarching European Framework. Their operational responsibilities include:
    • Lowering entry barriers: Acting as the local onboarding point for domestic research organizations, universities, and data repositories.
    • Handling national scope: Organizing, storing, and making discoverable resources funded by domestic budgets that primarily support the national research community.
  • Federating upwards: Ensuring that national data and tools conform to the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles so they can be discovered and accessed cross-border by the wider EU community if needed, even if their operational scope remains national.
  • The concept relies on a “system of systems” structure. The national node onboards services of national scope to organize its domestic ecosystem. Once onboarded locally, the national node provides the interoperability layer necessary to connect those resources into the wider EOSC Federation, making cross-border workflows viable over time.
  • In principle, services onboarded to the EOSC Federation should be of interest to researchers beyond national communities; however, since the aim of EOSC is to make European research outputs accessible throughout Europe, there is no such thing as purely national relevance. Unless there are any services or research outputs of any kind that are (in principle) only relevant to Austrian researchers, these should be available via the EOSC Federation.
How will EOSC be linked to the work in the European Cooperative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH)?
  • The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) is a €110 million EU-funded Horizon Europe initiative designed to connect researchers, curators, and conservators through a shared digital workspace. It provides specialized tools for artifact digitization, 3D mapping, and collaborative art restoration, helping smaller institutions overcome digital barriers.
  • Key Objectives & Features
    • Shared Workspace: Offers a secure, cloud-based environment for cross-border and transdisciplinary collaboration.
    • Advanced Technology: Delivers cutting-edge applications for tracking conservation histories, analyzing materials, and creating digital twins of cultural assets.
  • Inclusivity: Removes resource and technology barriers for remote or smaller museums, archives, and libraries.
  • Core Infrastructure: Spearheaded by the flagship ECHOES Project (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science) alongside specialized tool-developing projects like AUTOMATA and TEXTaiLES.
  • You can track overall program developments and funding updates via the European Commission Cultural Heritage Cloud Portal.
  • The Cultural Heritage Cloud – or European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) – is a European Union initiative to create a digital infrastructure that will connect cultural heritage researchers and professionals across the EU. It will develop specific digital collaborative tools for the sector while removing barriers for smaller and remote institutions. The goal is to help cultural heritage institutions, research organisations and other professional organisations of all kinds and sizes to work with their digital objects in a more visible, interconnected, harmonised, and informed way, to successfully cope with the challenges the digital transition poses to the sector and seize its opportunities. The Cultural Heritage Cloud will add a new digital dimension to cultural heritage preservation, conservation, restoration and enhancement by providing cutting-edge technologies, for instance for the digitization of artefacts or for researching artworks. The implementation of this initiative has now begun with the EU-funded project ECHOES – European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science, which started on the 1 of June 2024. Two other initiatives are currently running at European level:
    • funded by the Digital Europe programme, the common European data space for cultural heritage is an EU flagship initiative to accelerate the digital transformation of the sector and foster creation, access and reuse of heritage data.
    • The vision for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to put in place a system for researchers in Europe to store, share, process, analyse, and reuse data within and across disciplines and borders.
  • The European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage (ECCCH) strategically aligns with and complements the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). While EOSC provides a broad, multidisciplinary environment for general research data, the ECCCH acts as a dedicated, specialized domain-specific ecosystem tailored to the collaborative, analytical, and digital twin needs of the cultural heritage sector.
  • Both frameworks are anchored in Open Science, relying on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles and democratic access to knowledge. The ECCCH ensures technical and semantic interoperability with EOSC standards rather than duplicating them. Interconnecting both clouds allows cultural heritage professionals inside the ECCCH to tap into broader multi-disciplinary scientific datasets via EOSC Partnership, while external researchers gain open access to specialized heritage assets and resources. Because the ECCCH infrastructure is actively being established between 2024 and 2029 via the ECHOES (European Cloud for Heritage OpEn Science) consortium, the relationship has evolved from conceptual planning into actionable European policy. The relationship is mapped out in several recent policy and strategy publications:
    • The European Commission Policy Factsheet on “The Cultural Heritage Cloud: advancing with new tools” (March 2026) details the rolling implementation of cloud infrastructure and how newly funded digital tools fit into the wider ecosystem. “Shaping the future of cultural heritage” (August 2024) explores the structural nexus between the Cultural Heritage Cloud (ECCCH), the Common European Data Space for Cultural Heritage, and the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), laying the groundwork for how cross-cloud metadata and analytical pipelines operate without creating data silos.
    • European Research Area (ERA) Policy Agenda (2025–2027): The ERA Structural Policy Action 1 on Open Knowledge Sharing is formally documented via European national research infrastructure trackers (such as the Austrian ERA Portal), with a focus on expanding the EOSC Federation. It explicitly mandates establishing structural links between EOSC nodes and sectoral European data spaces—including the ECCCH ecosystem—to ensure Europe maps out a unified web of FAIR research data.
  • The EOSC Federation Handbook outlines the protocol for secondary nodes and domain-specific infrastructure (such as the ECCCH/ECHOES platforms) to technically federate into the broader EOSC ecosystem. It sets the structural rules for user access, identity verification, and multi-disciplinary tool-sharing as the EOSC Federation goes fully operational, mandating that the ECCCH align with standardized protocols for resource onboarding, metadata, and federated Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) to ensure seamless interoperability within the broader European Research Area.
  • ECHOES & Sister Project Documentation (2025–2026): As the legal and technical architect of the ECCCH, ECHOES actively publishes progress reports on constructing its “Digital Commons”. Their documentation outlines how the cloud utilizes EOSC-derived core services (like EGI Check-in and distributed storage management) to maintain an environment where both human researchers and AI agents can manipulate Heritage Digital Twins. In this, the ECHOES project leverages EGI-managed EOSC core services to build the ECCCH Digital Commons, focusing on integrating EGI Check-in for unified authentication and EGI federated cloud compute for analyzing Heritage Digital Twins. This infrastructure supports secure access via institutional credentials and provides tools like Jupyter Notebooks for collaborative research.
What happened to the search portal for research data?
  • The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) search functionality for research data, publications, software, and services is available through the EOSC EU Node. The legacy eosc-portal.eu has transitioned into this unified EU Node ecosystem, where the Resource Hub and Resource Catalogue serve as the primary interface to discover and reuse federated European research assets.
  • Core Access & Search Features
    • Multidisciplinary Discovery: Search millions of research outputs, including datasets, publications, software, and data management tools.
    • Advanced Filtering: Refine results by resource type, scientific domain, provider, and access policies.
  • Enriched Metadata: View view/download metrics, citation counts, and funding links connected to specific outputs.
  • Integrated ToolsHub: Access collaborative computing environments, container platforms, and interactive notebooks adjacent to your data search.
  • To search or explore available infrastructure resources, visit the EOSC EU Node.
What are tangible benefits for an institution to join the EOSC Federation?
  • Joining the EOSC Federation allows institutions to connect their local repositories, compute capacities, and digital services into a secure, interoperable pan-European network. This integration expands research visibility, simplifies cross-border resource sharing, and aligns institutional infrastructures with European Open Science policies.
  • Strategic & Policy Advantages
    • Shape Governance: Guide the implementation strategy and policies through active participation in advisory groups and assemblies (details via the EOSC Association).
    • Sovereignty & Standards: Secure institutional and national data sovereignty while adopting unified FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data standards.
  • Global Networking: Partner directly with peer institutions, research infrastructures, and data-driven industry spaces across Europe.
  • Operational & Technical Benefits
    • Resource Federation: Connect local data storage and high-performance computing to a wider network without losing local node autonomy.
    • Shared Core Services: Leverage federation-wide horizontal capabilities like single-sign-on (AAI), unified catalogues, accounting, and monitoring.
  • Capacity Building: Access role-based training resources, best-practice guidelines, and peer-to-peer learning frameworks for staff and researchers.
Status and future of EOSC Nodes
  • The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation includes 28 active Nodes mobilizing for a major production push. Following the autumn 2024 launch of the foundational EOSC EU Node, the network is transitioning from prototypes to full operational production, expanding core services like AAI, catalogs, and helpdesks, and onboarding a second wave of national, thematic, and e-infrastructure nodes. 28 established EOSC Nodes are actively coordinating operations, which includes 13 first-wave Nodes, the EOSC EU Node, and 14 second-wave candidate nodes (including national, pan-European e-infrastructure, and thematic entities) which are progressively enrolling through 2026 and 2027. Integration baselines, Node Registration Policies, and user dashboards are active, allowing researchers to log in via institutional credentials to access storage, compute, and shared data spaces (via the EOSC EU Node).
  • Production Transition: The EOSC Federation is scaling toward a solid operational production phase.
  • Legal Framework: Stakeholders are aiming to shift from current (non-binding) MoUs and interim governance models toward a formal, legally binding operational framework.
  • Capacity Building: Planned rollouts include the EOSC Academy to boost user competencies and broader alignment with Horizon Europe projects.
Why were the EOSC Marketplace and EOSC Portal discontinued?
  • The original European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Portal and Marketplace (developed largely under the EU-funded EOSC Future project) are no longer available. They have been retired and transitioned into the next operational phase of the initiative managed directly by the European Commission, known as the EOSC EU Node. The classic legacy portal (eosc-portal.eu) officially shut down its direct user services, pointing visitors instead to the new framework. The official operational environment and next phase can now be accessed via the European Commission EOSC EU Node. The underlying marketplace and service registry structures are shifting toward broader, federated management models (such as EOSC Beyond and the official EU-owned managed services framework).
Where can I upload my paper on EOSC?
  • You cannot upload your paper directly to the core EOSC infrastructure (the EOSC EU Node). Because the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) operates as a federated network, you must upload your paper to an associated, trusted repository instead. The data from these repositories is then automatically indexed and made searchable via the EOSC Marketplace and Resource Hub. You can use the following options to upload your paper:
  • EU-Funded Universal Platforms: The European Commission officially supports and recommends two free, fully integrated platforms:
    • Zenodo: Ideal for preprints, final papers, related datasets, and software snapshots.
    • Open Research Europe: An open-access publishing platform with open peer review. This is currently available primarily to beneficiaries of EU funding programs like Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe.
  • National Repositories of EOSC Partners: Depending on where you conduct your research, your national EOSC node provides connected open-access archives. Examples include:
    • HAL (France): The central French national archive for scientific publications.
    • OPEN (Poland): The Polish repository for scientific texts and reports.
  • Research.fi (Finland) or the BERD Data Portal (Germany).
  • Institutional and Thematic Repositories
    • University Databases: Use the institutional repository (such as the CRIS system or open-access portal) of your own university.
    • Thematic Nodes: For specific fields, use specialized EOSC-linked nodes, such as the CERN Open Data Portal for particle physics or the Blue-Cloud Catalogue for marine sciences.
  • Important When Uploading: When filling out the metadata in your chosen repository, make sure to include the funding organization, project acronym, and grant number. This allows the EOSC infrastructure to correctly link your paper and automatically track compliance with open-access mandates (such as those from the EU or the OpenAIRE network).

Partners

We strive for a coordinated development of the Austrian Open Science Policy and the realisation of the goals of the EOSC – namely the creation of an open multi-disciplinary environment to publish, find and re-use data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes. The participation of other institutions in the EOSC initiative is explicitly desired. We thus invite you to get involved and join the initiative!​
Join

The national initiative of EOSC Austria is:

  • legally represented by the ACONET Association (the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organization) 
  • managed by its operational body, the EOSC Support Office Austria. 

The partners share a vision of enhancing EOSC in Austria to make scientific processes more open and effective. 

Their activities are in line with the goals of the EOSC Association, fostering collaboration and knowledge sharing. 

Specialized Working Groups (WGs) advance EOSC topics and monitor Open Science developments in Austria.

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