The European
Open Science Cloud (EOSC)
The goal of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to provide European researchers, companies and citizens with a federated and open multidisciplinary environment in which they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation and education purposes. It aims to do this across borders and scientific disciplines by bringing together existing research infrastructures from different disciplines and EU member states.
The EOSC Association
The EOSC Association was established to govern the EOSC along with four partners – CESAER, CSIC, GARR and GÉANT – in July 2020. Since then, it has grown and currently includes over 200 members, as well as members with observer status. These are jointly responsible for achieving the goals agreed upon in the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed by the European Commission and the EOSC Association to form the EOSC partnership. Interested organizations are invited to join the EOSC Association as members or observers.
The EOSC Advisory Groups
& Task Forces
The Advisory Groups (AGs) are a structure allowing the EOSC Association members and others to support the implementation of EOSC. The five AGs – Implementation of EOSC, Metadata and data quality, Research Careers and Curricula, Technical challenges on EOSC, and Sustaining EOSC – consist of 13 Task Forces (TFs). Austria is involved in all of them:
The EOSC
Development to Date
- PID policy and implementation
- Researcher engagement and adoption
- Rules of participation compliance monitoring
- Data stewardship curricula and career paths
- Research careers, recognition, and credit
- Upskilling countries to engage in EOSC
- AAI Architecture
- Infrastructure for quality research software
- Technical interoperability of data and services
Sustaining EOSC
With the aim of building a competitive data and knowledge economy in Europe, the EOSC initiative was proposed by the European Commission (EC) in 2016 as part of the European Cloud Initiative. From 2016 to 2017, extensive consultation with scientific and institutional stakeholders took place. In March 2018, the European Commission presented the outcome of the consultation as a roadmap for the implementation of EOSC. EOSC was officially launched at the University of Vienna in November 2018. In 2020 an interim EOSC Governance was launched in order to facilitate strategic orientation for the implementation of the EOSC after 2020 as well as to steer overall progress. During this phase, 2018-2020, around €250 million were invested in its development under Horizon 2020.
The article Developing EOSC, published by ACOnet in 2019, provides a comprehensive overview of the governance structures of EOSC and the status of developments during the initial phase.
The current phase of the EOSC’s implementation started in 2021 and will last until 2030. It is taking place against the background of the EOSC partnership and follows the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA). The EOSC initiative supports a stakeholder-driven approach to steer a shared vision as well as common objectives on the European, national and institutional levels. In addition, in the next seven years, a co-investment including both in kind and financial contributions of at least €1 billion by EU as well as non-EU partners is anticipated.