European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Pilot project launched! : OpenAIRE blog

"The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Pilot project kicked off last 17-18 January in Amsterdam. The EOSCpilot brings together about 50 partners, third-parties and subcontractors to support the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). It will establish the governance framework for the EOSC and contribute to the development of European open science policy and best practice. Moreover, it will develop a number of working scientific demonstrators that show interoperability and its benefits in a number of scientific domains, by integrating services and infrastructures. Finally, it will engage 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.

The EOSCpilot project aims at addressing some of the key reasons why European research is not yet fully tapping into the potential of data, in particular by reducing the existing geographic, thematic, technological, and governance fragmentation between data infrastructures; by improving interoperability between data infrastructures and demonstrating how data and resources can be shared even when they are large and complex and in varied formats; by providing incentives and other means to enhance openness to data coming from publicly funded research, and; by engaging stakeholders of different scientific communities.

In this way, the EOSC pilot project will improve the ability to reuse data resources and provide an important step towards building a dependable open-data research environment where data from publicly funded research is always open and there are clear incentives and rewards for the sharing of data and resources.

This ambitious project will face challenges related to technology, culture and governance. On the technological side, EOSC will need to provide real interoperability among infrastructures and data, in order to ensure standardisation and services operation. With respect to governance, the EOSCpilot must create an open governance  and policy framework for the EOSC that is inclusive of all stakeholders. However, the most difficult challenge would probably rely in radically changing the culture of researchers and infrastructure managers, engaging them so that to remove obstacles related to the availability of own data and to the use of other’s infrastructures. In this scenario, it would be then vital to collaborate with other relevant initiatives such as OpenAIRE, EUDAT and so on, in order to establish a common ground of infrastructures and interoperability on different levels."