The project EOSC-CONNECT kicked-off last week with a meeting in Helsinki (Finland), home of the coordinating organisation CSC. The Austrian community is represented in the consortium by the EOSC SOA members TU Wien/Austrian Scientific Computing (ASC), OpenKnowledge Maps and TU Graz, joining organisations across Europe behind 14 emerging national EOSC Nodes from Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland. EOSC CONNECT aims at making EOSC work across borders. The Austrian project partners were represented by Florian Goldenberg (ASC), Peter Kraker (OpenKnowledge Maps), Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi, Stefan Reichmann and Miguel Rey Mazón (TU Graz).

EOSC-CONNECT (part of the INFRAEOSC-2025-01-01 call together with EOSC Mesh, EOSC4ALL and EOSCMarine) will support EOSC National Nodes during their development to increase interoperability and sustainability and help them enrol in the EOSC Federation. The support goes beyond implementing technical federating capabilities to address governance, legal, organisational and sustainability to make national EOSC Nodes the entry points to EOSC with national research and innovation ecosystems.

The project will create a common blueprint for EOSC National Nodes, peer learning, cross-border resource sharing, multi-node use cases and demonstrators to translate stronger connections between Nodes into tangible value for researchers.

After setting the scene with presentations from CSC’s CEO Kimmo Koski and Bob Jones, Special Envoy for the EOSC Federation of the EOSC Association, the first day was dedicated to introduce the work to be carried out in the six work packages. Mr Jones showed ongoing plans to start the operations of the EOSC Federation, where national EOSC Nodes have an important role to play.

The activities to be carried out across the project include training of national EOSC Node operators, work towards achieving compliance with mandatory Federating Capabilities, and formulation of business models suitable for national EOSC Nodes. The use cases and demonstrators will involve AI Factories, and solutions for federated storage and compute. Two webinars per country are scheduled to enable national stakeholders in the consortium to exchange experiences and demonstrate the value of collaboration among nodes. A grant scheme will support Nodes in the onboarding of third-party resources and develop use cases in two open calls.

EOSC CONNECT is perfectly aligned with the efforts of EOSC SOA to converge towards an Austrian EOSC Node that ensures Austria’s participation in the EOSC Federation.