EOSC News

As the year 2024 is coming to an end and the holiday season is approaching, we would like to take a moment and look back on the passing year. It has been full of EOSC-activities both in Austria and internationally as can be seen in our Activity Report 2023/2024 (https://zenodo.org/records/13839287) or on the website. For example, you may want to check out our collection of newsletters (https://eosc-austria.at/newsletter/), or past events (https://eosc-austria.at/news/#news-events).

Take a look at the updated slide deck on EOSC-related Horizon Europe projects’ stakeholder engagement activities and see if you spot any synergies with your own work!

The EOSC Association’s 9th General Assembly (GA) on 22 November 2024 brought together more than 220 online participants, including delegates and guests. The meeting served to lay the foundation for a pivotal year ahead in which the EOSC Federation will advance toward operations and the future governance of EOSC will start emerging.

Here you will find the key takeaways and materials from this pivotal event, where stakeholders from the EOSC community gathered in Berlin on 21-23 October 2024 to discuss and shape the build-up phase of the EOSC Federation.

The EOSC Association’s General Assembly filled three positions on the EOSC-A Board of Directors, and re-elected Sara Garavelli to a second three-year term.
The three new directors are Kamran Naim of CERN and Roxanne Wyns of LIBIS – KU Leuven Libraries, who will both serve three-year terms, and Licia Florio of NORDUnet, who will fill a one-year position. The Directors will take up their responsibilities on 01 January 2025.

At the EOSC Association’s 9th General Assembly meeting, held online on 22 November 2024, five new Members and four new Observers were voted into the Association.
These nine organisations are based in seven different countries, representing research-performing organisations, research-funding bodies and service providers. Three of the new Members (SIB, NORDUnet and RDA Europe) upgraded from their previous status as Observers, while the other six organisations are new to EOSC-A.

We are happy to share news about a significant collaboration between the EVERSE and FAIRCORE4EOSC projects (see descriptions below), alongside the launch of the new EOSC-A Opportunity Area Expert Group, OA7: Research Software. Through this collaboration, we are committed to recognizing software as a first-class output, advancing the broader objectives of Open Science, enhancing the EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) ecosystem, and ensuring the sustainability of research software infrastructures.

Networking EOSC and NFDI even better – that was the aim of the two-day EOSCxNFDI event. As a side event of the EOSC Symposium 2024, EOSCxNFDI took place on 23 and 24 October at the H4 Hotel Berlin-Alexanderplatz. A total of 122 people attended.

Die österreichische Datenstrategie bildet einen zentralen Pfeiler für den wirtschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt im Land. Sie legt den Grundstein für eine gezielte und verantwortungsvolle Nutzung von Daten, die insbesondere im Bereich der öffentlichen Verwaltung zu evidenzbasierten Entscheidungen beitragen und die Entwicklung neuer, innovativer Dienstleistungen und Produkte vorantreiben sollen. Durch den verstärkten Zugang zu Daten soll nicht nur die Effizienz und Transparenz staatlicher Prozesse verbessert werden, sondern auch ein Beitrag zum Wohl der gesamten Gesellschaft geleistet werden.

Following her re-election as European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to put “research and innovation, science and technology, at the centre of our economy” during her next five-year mandate. The rationale for doing so has multiple drivers: a growing innovation gap between Europe, the US and China; increasingly ambitious decarbonisation goals; defence and security threats from war in Ukraine and the Middle East, spurring geopolitical interest in further EU enlargement; and the need for productivity gains to support sustainable growth and competitiveness, among others.

The Austria Country Profile was created within the initiative of the EOSC Support Office Austria. It is a deliverable of the Working Group (WG) “Austria Country Profile”.

On the 7th of October 2024 the EOSC Support Office Austria hosted a webinar to share the outcomes of the former Task Forces. The aim was to inform the community about the achievements

Read the National Pilot Interview from Austria and explore all the progress of OSTrails pilot studies. Check the latest on their national activities and learn how they’re progressing with the integration of open science and research assessment. This month we had the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Spichtinger and Victoria Eisenheld from the Univerisity of Vienna (UNI WIEN), Tomasz Miksa from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) and Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi from the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). Enjoy!

FAIR Implementation Workshop: National Level Impact on FAIR – Introduction of the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation and the national FAIR initiatives
The Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation and the national FAIR initiatives were introduced in the FAIR Implementation Workshop on National Level Impact on FAIR on the 1 October 2024. Ilire Hasani-Mavriqi, first speaker of the EOSC SOA General Assembly, was invited to give a keynote. She presented the Austrian Open Science and FAIR landscape and our initiatives such as EOSC SOA and Cluster Research Data as best practice examples of how to create FAIR implementation plans at the national level.

The programme of the EOSC Symposium 2024 is composed of 26 thought-provoking sessions on topics that define Open Science and lie at the heart of the successful deployment of EOSC.

Named after Zenodotus, the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history, Zenodo was launched in 2013, as a catch-all repository for research funded by the European Commission. In addition to being a repository, Zenodo, with the support of CERN, provides access to Big Data management tools and enhanced digital library capabilities for Open Data. As the need for such a repository was not limited to one research funding organisation or one nation for that matter, Zenodo’s novel concept quickly caught on and became a “hit” with the Open Science community; research from all over the world and from every discipline began to pour in, making the newly-minted repository a popular destination for Open Science scholars.

Links (in case they don't work above): https://www.eosc.cz/en, https://eosc-austria.at/
Please add the last picture (whole group): The EOSC CZ and EOSC SOA teams in front of a statue of Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia for whom the university is named.

A transnational exchange took recently place in Brno at Masaryk University between the EOSC CZ Initiative and the EOSC Support Office Austria (SOA). The full-day program featured mutual presentations about the respective EOSC project’s organization, progress, resources, and community needs and specificities. The EOSC CZ Initiative, known for its centralized and well-organized national strategy, is dedicated to connecting all research data infrastructures across the Czech Republic, creating a national repository, and offering supercomputing capabilities.

Links (in case they don't work above): https://www.eosc.cz/en, https://eosc-austria.at/
Please add the last picture (whole group): The EOSC CZ and EOSC SOA teams in front of a statue of Masaryk, the first president of Czechoslovakia for whom the university is named.

The Austria Country Profile was created within the initiative of the EOSC Support Office Austria. It is a deliverable of the Working Group (WG) “Austria Country Profile”.