EOSC-Pillar: mixing national recipes to build the European Open Science Cloud

Officially kicked off on 5 July 2019 in Rome, for the next 3 years, EOSC-Pillar will coordinate national Open Science efforts across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy, and ensure their contribution and readiness for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The EOSC is envisioned to offer 1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science, technology, the humanities and social sciences a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing scientific data infrastructures, currently dispersed across disciplines and the EU Member States.

EOSC-Pillar is part of EOSC regional projects funded under the INFRAEOSC 5b call and will work in sync with other regional projects such as EOSC Nordic, NI4OS-Europe, EOSC Synergy and ExPaNDS. These projects aim to coordinate the efforts of the national and thematic initiatives in making a coherent contribution to EOSC.

Diversity in policy, and technological and infrastructural maturity among European Union Member States still remains a barrier to the transnational nature of EOSC and research in general. But what unites European countries is the value that they see the EOSC will bring to their own research capabilities. This is why the EOSC-Pillar was established.

Consortium

The project is coordinated by GARR, Italy’s national research and education network (NREN) and involves the following organisations: University of Vienna from Austria, Ghent University from Belgium, CINES, CNRS, IFREMER, INRA, INRIA and INSERM from France, DKRZ, Fraunhofer, GFZ and KIT from Germany, and CINECA, CMCC, CNR, INFN and Trust-IT from Italy.

These organisations are already key players in their own countries and have already contributed to the development of Open Science and FAIR data initiatives in their fields.