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Thursday, 28.03.2024, 23:27
European Open Science Cloud: Strategic Implementation Plan
In building EOSC, the Commission is designing a virtual “common
place”, where science producers and science consumers come together for additional
insights, new ideas and more innovation. The EOSC’s concept is “federal” in
scope: i.e. by federating information data and services it can add value to
innovative goods and services. EOSC uses ICT means to modernize the ways the EU
states are managing science and research, the way collective scientific knowledge
is created in all sciences’ fields.
In May 2019, the EOSC Executive Board presented the
Strategic Implementation Plan for comments from the member states and subsequent
approval. The EOSC Strategic Implementation Plan presents the activities that
will contribute to the implementation of the EOSC for the 2019-2020 periods.*)
*) European Open
Science Cloud: Strategic Implementation Plan. Prepared by the Executive
Board of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC); European Commission
Directorate-General for Research and Innovation/ Directorate G “Research &
Innovation Outreach” and Unit G.4 “Open Science”. Commission Publication, June
2019. - 48 pp. ISBN 978-92-76-09175-2.
References to: [email protected]
and [email protected]
Background: “federating” the EU research potentials
Growing information and data volumes present a serious
problem for all kind of users: today the global increase in data per year is
measured in zettabytes (1021 bytes). For most of the scientists, it is becoming
too complicated to follow the innovative paths, to read all the relevant
material that is being published in their corresponding scientific disciplines.
In some research spheres there are more relevant
publications written in one year than a person can read during the whole lifespan.
Thus, quite often, with the help of numerous search facilities, pertinent
publications are selected for analysis and reading.
However, most of the modern socio-economic problems can be
resolved only through a cross-sectoral approach, i.e. with the help of several scientific
disciplines to find sophisticated solutions. In other words, in order to find relevant
data and “present” them in an accessible way, the scientists need a combination
of means that would lead to faster reuse and re-assessment of scientific
achievements.
The new EOSC Governance started its activities in 2019; the
Governance Board first met at the end of January 2019. Based upon the
suggestions of the Executive Board, it decided on the prioritization of five
topics and the creation of five working groups.
In March 2019, the Executive Board discussed in more details the description of each working group together with the nomination of a coordinator for each of the following groups:
- Landscape; FAIR approach (findable, accessible, interoperable, and re-usable info);
- EOSC Architecture;
- Rules of Participation, and
- Sustainability.
Thus, the EOSC will be the result of the federation of
existing EU member states’ ICT infrastructures augmented by the new services
dedicated to sharing publications, data and software for the benefit of
research and business communities. The evolution of existing infrastructures
and the creation of new ones will remain under the sole responsibility of the
national governance. The federating efforts are therefore the way that EOSC
will make a difference by offering services that are urgently needed by the
science community, academia and entrepreneurs.
More on the open
science facilities in: Eugene Eteris. Turning digital: challenges and
perspectives for science and research in the EU.
http://www.baltic-course.com/eng/modern_eu/?doc=151808
Supplement: EOSC projects in Horizon 2020
It is well-worth looking at previous and the existing
EOSC-projects supported by the Commission research funding; the simple
enumeration shows both the diversity and complexity of EOSC’s implementation
agenda.
= GÉANT (total
funding €192 mln 2016-22) serves as the network access provider for the EOSC,
contributing, together with the National Research and Education Networks
(NRENs), secure seamless high-speed multi-domain networking and wide peering
together with federated identity services delivering appropriate access to
cloud services, data, research infrastructures and the many other components
and resources of the EOSC. In addition, GÉANT has a role in a coordinated data
management framework where the network, compute and storage are all working
together to serve the needs of researchers.
= Helix Nebula
Science Cloud (HNSciCloud) is a
European pre-commercial procurement (PCP) initiative co-funded by Horizon 2020.
Scientific research in many different domains generates massive amounts of
data, creating enormous challenges for data capturing, management and
processing. Today commercial cloud services do not play a significant role in
the production computing environments for the publicly funded research sector
in Europe. Using the PCP-approach, leading research organisations from 7
countries have joint to pull together commercial cloud service providers,
publicly funded e-Infrastructures and in-house resources to build a hybrid cloud
platform on top of which a competitive marketplace of European cloud players
can develop their own services for a wide range of users. The project brings
together Europe’s technical development, policy and procurement activities to
remove fragmentation and maximise exploitation.
= EOSCpilot project
(Jan 2017-April 2019) supported the first phase in the EOSC development; it trials
the governance framework for the EOSC and contribute to the EOSC development
and best practice; develops a number of demonstrators functioning as
high-profile pilots that integrate services and infrastructures to show
interoperability in a number of scientific domains. Besides, it engages with a
broad range of stakeholders, crossing borders and communities, to build the
trust and skills required for adoption of an open approach to scientific
research.
= eInfraCentral (Jan
2017-June 2019, with a €1.5m funding) is providing access to the catalogue of
e-Infrastructure services which will feed the EOSC-Hub. The overall aim of the project
is to ensure that a broader and more varied set of users (including industry)
benefits from European infrastructures. The catalogue is the single point of
reference for researchers and the broad community to discover and compare
services and resources, as well as to monitor the performance and quality
across multiple service providers.
= Freya (Dec
2017-Nov 2020, with €5m funding) will provide a robust environment for a range
of Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), as an EOSC essential component. A universal
and persistent mechanism will be developed for discovering elements in the EOSC
interoperable research environment, through richer linking of research
entities, metadata enrichment and improved machine “actionability”.
= EOSC-Hub (Jan
2018-Dec 2020, with €30m funding directly contributes to the EOSC
implementation. The project will integrate and consolidate services, software
and data from the key existing eInfrastructures (EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI,
INDIGO-DataCloud and major research eInfrastructures through a pan-European
access mechanism), providing an integrated entry point to both generic and
thematic services for the scientific community. Through the project's virtual
access mechanism, more scientific communities and users will have access to services
supporting scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and
geographical boundaries. The project will improve skills and knowledge among
researchers and service operators by delivering specialised trainings and by
establishing competence centres to co-create solutions.
= OpenAIRE-Advance
(an 2018-Dec 2020, with €10m) addresses key aspects and challenges of the
currently transforming scholarly communication landscape in terms of quality
assurance and communication of scientific outputs. The project is based on the
OpenAIRE network that supports, accelerates and monitors the EOSC implementation,
including Open Access to publications and research data.
= RDA Europe 4.0
(March 2018- May 2020, with €3.5m funding) addresses the need for open and
interoperable sharing of research data and the need to build social, technical
and cross-disciplinary links to enable such sharing on a global scale. It
builds on its community-driven and bottom-up approach, which has been
operational since 2012.
= PaNOSC
(Dec-2018-Nov 2022) is based on existing local meta-data catalogues and data
repositories to provide federated services for making data easily findable,
accessible, interoperable, and re-usable (so-called FAIR-approach). As is
known, extracting the scientific value of the experimental data produced in
research and innovations (RIs) is a complicated task: the raw data tends to be
larger and larger and quite often require special skills for being correctly
exploited. PaNOSC will develop and provide data analysis services to overcome
these difficulties.
= OCRE (Jan 2019-Dec 2021) as an open
cloud for research environments, combines the expertise of four partners to
enable access and drive the adoption and use of commercial digital services by
the European research community. After gathering user requirements, the OCRE
will manage the adoption funds and buy resources from the selected suppliers
and make cloud resources available to research institutions. Such a delivery
vehicle is effective and efficient to contemplate “the supply & demand”
sides.
= ARCHIVER (Jan
2019-Dec 2021) uses the PCP instrument and builds on results of recent
projects. The ARCHIVER’s goal is to fulfill data management in a
multi-disciplinary environment, allowing each research group to retain
ownership of their data whilst leveraging best practices, standards and
economies of scale. ARCHIVER will combine multiple ICT technologies, including
extreme data-scaling, network connectivity, service inter-operability and
business models, in a hybrid cloud environment to deliver end-to-end archival
and preservation services that cover the full research lifecycle.
= SSHOC (Jan
2019-April 2022) aims at providing a full-fledged Social Sciences and
Humanities Open Cloud, SSHOC where data, tools, and training are available and
accessible for users. Main idea is determined by the goal to further the
innovation of infrastructural support for digital scholarship, to stimulate
multidisciplinary collaboration across the various social sciences’ subfields
and to increase the potential for societal impact. The intention is to create a
European open cloud ecosystem for social sciences and humanities, consisting of
an infrastructural and human component.
= ENVRI-FAIR (Jan
2019-Dec 2022) is the connection of the ESFRI Cluster of Environmental Research
Infrastructures (ENVRI) to the EOSC. Participating research infrastructures
(RIs) of the environmental domain cover the sub-domains of atmosphere, marine,
solid earth and biodiversity/ecosystems to cover full complexity of the Earth
system. The overarching goal is that all participating RIs will create a set of
FAIR data services which would enhance the efficiency and productivity of
researchers, support innovation, while enabling efficient data- and knowledge-based
decisions.
= FAIRsFAIR (Feb
2019-Jan 2022), the project is on fostering FAIR data culture and the uptake of
good practices in making data FAIR. It will focus on all scientific communities
for supporting, creating, further developing and implementing a common scheme
to ensure data development, wide uptake of and compliance with FAIR data
principles and practices by data producers as well as national and European
research data providers and repositories contributing to the EOSC.
= ESCAPE (Feb
2019-July 2022). The ESCAPE (European Science Cluster of Astronomy &
Particle physics ESFRI research infrastructures) aims to address the Open
Science challenges shared by ESFRI facilities, as well as other pan-European
research infrastructures in astronomy and particle physics. ESCAPE actions will
be focused on developing solutions for the large data sets and will unite
astrophysics and particle physics communities with proven expertise in
computing and data management.
= EOSC-Life
(March 2019-Feb 2023): the project brings together 13 biological and medical
ESFRI research infrastructures to create an open collaborative space for
digital biology as a response to the challenge of analysing and reusing the
prodigious amounts of data produced by life science. The goal of the EOSC-Life
project is to make sure that life-scientists can access and integrate
life-science data for analysis and reuse in academic and industrial research.
= EOSC-Nordic
(Sept 2019-Aug 2022): the project aims at facilitating EOSC’s coordination of
relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit
synergies to achieve greater harmonisation at policy and service provisioning.
It brings together a consortium of 24 partners including e-infrastructure
providers, research performing organisations and expert networks, with regard
to the provision of research services and open science policy.
= EOSC-Pillar
(July 2019-June 2022): the project unites representatives of the fast-growing
national initiatives for coordinating data infrastructures and services from Italy,
France, Germany, Austria and Belgium to establish an agile and efficient
federation model for open science services covering the full spectrum of
European research.
= EOSC-Synergy
(Sept 2019-Feb 2022): the project extends the EOSC coordination to nine
participating countries by harmonizing policies and federating relevant
national research e-Infrastructures, scientific data and thematic services,
bridging the gap between national initiatives and EOSC. The project introduces
new capabilities by opening national thematic services to European access, thus
expanding the EOSC offer in the Environment, Climate Change, Earth Observation
and Life Sciences.
= ExPaNDS (Sept
2019-Aug 2022): the Photon and Neutron Data Services (ExPaNDS) is to enrich the
EOSC with data management services and to coordinate activities to enable
national Photon and Neutron (PaN) RIs to make the majority of their data ‘open’
following FAIR principles and to harmonise their efforts to make their data
catalogues and data analysis services accessible through the EOSC, thereby
enabling them to be shared in a uniform way.
= NI4OS-Europe
(Sept 2019-Aug 2022): the project is to support the development and inclusion
of the national OSC’s initiatives in 15 EU states and some associated countries
in the overall scheme of EOSC governance; spread the EOSC and FAIR principles
in the community and train it; and provide technical and policy support in
on-boarding of the existing and future service providers into EOSC, including
generic services (compute, data storage, data management), thematic services,
repositories and data sets - thus covering the whole spectrum of services
related to Open Science, data and publications.
=Finally, the
EOSCsecretariat.eu (Jan 2019-June 2021) serves as a coordination structure
to deliver on EOSC’s proactive, dynamic and flexible approach with the
necessary competences, resources and vision. The 30-month project will maintain
a practical approach addressing all the specific needs of the EOSC
coordination. For example, it will adopt a co-creation approach working with
the community to deliver many of the activities. Source: EOSC Implementation Report-2019, pp. 34-42.