The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a European Commission initiative aiming at developing an infrastructure providing its users with services promoting open science practices. Besides being open science oriented, the envisaged infrastructure is built by aggregating services provided by several providers following a System of systems approach. Its goal is to establish a federation of infrastructures facilitating effortless access to interoperable research assets and enhanced services spanning geographical boundaries and diverse academic fields.

The initiative started in 2015 with the plan that its organizers finish it by 2020. A European Union committee on research endorsed a plan for the cloud's development in May 2018. The European Open Science Cloud officially launched in November 2018, starting to provide access to services via their EOSC Portal.

Public meetings about the project have emphasized the ideological motivations for promoting open science.

EOSC Governance

The development of EOSC is governed by three bodies: An executive board tasked to ensure implementation and accountability; a Governance board, working as an institutional group gathering representatives from the Member States and Associated Countries and from the Commission to ensure effective supervision of the EOSC implementation; and a Stakeholder Forum working as the community actively contributing and participating to the EOSC.

EC funded Projects contributing to EOSC development

The EOSC infrastructure is built by leveraging on efforts and services developed and operated by several providers. Moreover, the European Commission specifically funded several projects contributing to the development of EOSC including:

  • projects started in 2017 (January 2017 - May 2019) (January 2017 - 30 June 2019)
  • projects started in 2018 (January 2018 - December 2020) (January 2018 - December 2020) (December 2018 - November 2022)
  • projects started in 2019 (December 2019 - November 2021) (March 2019 - February 2023) (September 2019 - August 2022) (July 2019 - June 2022) (September 2019 - February 2022) (January 2019 - June 2021) (September 2019 - August 2022) (March 2019 - February 2022) (September 2019 - August 2022) (November 2019 - October 2022)

Further reading

  • Ekin, Annette (26 November 2018). . Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine.
  • Candela, Leonardo; Castelli, Donatella; Zoppi, Franco (2019). (Technical report). EOSC-pilot.
  • Jones, Sarah; Abramatic, Jean-François, eds. (2019). (Technical report). European Commission.

External links

  • Open Access Tracking Project.