General Assembly

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.

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

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.

UNESCO has set up five working groups, each targeting key impact areas crucial for implementing the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science (OS) adopted on 23 November 2021. While the Recommendation affirmed the importance of open science as a vital tool to improve the quality and accessibility of both scientific outputs and scientific processes, these working groups brought together experts and open science entities from various fields and domains to address distinct yet interconnected topics and challenges essential to the implementation of the Recommendation.

The FAIR-IMPACT National Roadshow visited Austria on June 18th. This event was hosted by the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz) as part of “Shared RDM Services & Infrastructure” project. Around 50 participants from Austria and beyond joined to explore the latest advancements in Open Science within the country and to learn about outcomes from EOSC-related projects, including FAIR-IMPACT.

An expert group of the EOSC Steering Board (EOSC-SB), the Policy Sub-Group, in collaboration with the ESFRI-EOSC Coordination Task Force wrote two opinion papers analysing a set of key disruptive concepts and practices connected to the construction and future operation of EOSC. The partnership is further enhanced by the participation of the Swiss Library Service Platform (SLSP), the operator of Switzerland’s national library platform, swisscovery, which will bring Open Knowledge Maps visualisations to over 500 libraries. This widespread support from the Swiss research community will strengthen Open Knowledge Maps and its open infrastructure as a part of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).