A ‘coalition of doers’ called on to build complex EU science cloud - Science|Business

"At a meeting to push the next phase of one of the most ambitious projects undertaken by Brussels, Moedas told heads of Europe’s leading research institutes and big science infrastructures, 'We are not short of [cloud] initiatives. But there is no one-stop-shop for researchers. No overall architecture that allows them to connect.'

The vision is that with a few clicks researchers will get access to data from any laboratory or scientific discipline across Europe. The cloud project will install the essential plumbing for this to happen, by interconnecting data infrastructures run by commercial and publicly-funded providers, adding software, metadata, data registries and other tools needed to glue these existing services together.

The Commission’s digital and research directorates are incubating the project, which Moedas wants to see up and running by 2020. He told researchers in the room, who included representatives from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, CERN and the Spallation Source, to form a 'coalition of doers' to build 'the new republic of letters', a reference to the network of correspondence that once linked thinkers including Locke, Voltaire and Rousseau."