The EOSC Early Adopter Programme - 2nd Call

The second call for the EOSC Early Adopter Programme is now open. Deadline to submit applications is 1 November 2019, 18:00 CET. Apply now!

EOSC offers a broad spectrum of services and technologies for the research data management lifecycle, and scientific outputs like data, publications and software of pan-European relevance. The combined use of these technologies and resources can allow scientific communities to address complex scientific challenges.

The services and resources in scope for the programme are those currently provided by the EOSC-hub project and its partners, namely OCRE, OpenAIRE and GÉANT.

Why the EOSC Early Adopter Programme?

• To train and support researchers on the usage of the resources and services made available by EOSC-hub and partners via the EOSC marketplace and the OCRE project;
• To gain insight into digital needs of researchers and their use cases;
• To foster a culture of co-operation between researchers and some of the EOSC service service providers (namely EOSC-hub, OpenAIRE, OCRE, and GÉANT).
• To foster confidence in the capability and capacity that will be provided via the EOSC.

The ultimate goal of the programme is to gain insight into researchers’ needs and with their participation drive the future developments of the EOSC.

What are the services in scope?

The list of services, research data and other scientific products offered in the programme is available on the EOSC marketplace. The Early Adopter Programme offers a wide range of services and solutions for:

• Data discovery and reuse
• Data processing and analysis
• Data management, curation and preservation
• Access, deposition and sharing, federated authentication and authorization

THE PROGRAMME IS SUPPORTED BY:

EOSC-hub Consortium:

• EGI Federation
• EUDAT CDI
• Indigo-DataCloud
• Bijvoet Center, Utrecht University (NL)
• CLARIN CloudFerro (PL)
• CNR (IT)
• Deutsches Klimarechenzentrum (DE)
• EODC GmbH (AT)
• Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change (IT)
• European Space Agency Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics (IT)
• LNEC and LIP (PT)
• Ruder Boškovic Institute (HR and DARIAH)
• RASDAMAN (DE)
• Terradue Srl (IT)

EOSC-hub Partners: The Early Adopter Programme is open to partners external to the project who are willing to commit own funding to support resource communities in their projects. The list of participating partners currently includes OpenAIRE and GÉANT. In addition, from July 2019 a collaboration will be put in place with the OCRE project. OCRE stimulates the uptake of commercial cloud services as part of the EOSC. EOSC-hub will support the resource communities with applying for EC cloud adoption funds available via the OCRE project: vouchers for free cloud resources. The list of partners participating in the programme will be further extended in the coming months.

Who should apply?

The programme is for researchers and research communities working on complex research projects in need of services based on multiple, different technologies, that want to benefit from access to state-of-the-art technologies, research infrastructures and services that are not available in their current research environment. The programme will allow them to scale up their own research infrastructure capacities and capabilities and to access a richer set of resources.

The Offer

For a period of 6 to 12 months, depending on the complexity of the application, the selected applicants will receive:

• Support from expert staff providing the services, who will enable integrating activities with the EOSC resources;
• The technical infrastructure needed for piloting technical solutions. This will include the access to resources like data, applications, software, and other services from EOSC-hub providers and partners depending on the research community needs;
• Resources up to 150 CPU cores, 300 GB of RAM, 2 TB of storage for data analysis and 10 TB for long term archiving. Nonetheless, this does not preclude requests of other amounts. If your project needs more capacity, you are advised to contacte-mail us via for advice: early-adopter@mailman.eosc-hub.eu. The exact amount of resources assigned to each selected application will be established on a case by case in collaboration with the applicant during the technical assessment of the proposals.
• Financial support to cover the applicants’ travel costs to attend f2f meetings and other relevant events.

EOSC-hub support will not include:

• Consumable costs
• Salary for your staff

At the end of the piloting phase the selected projects will have the possibility to scale up the achieved setting in capacity and capability, moving towards a full-scale production environment. This stage will involve activities like selecting the technologies and services that have been successfully adopted, and the acquisition of the capacity needed for the production phase.

Selection criteria

The Early Adopter Programme is calling for projects from research communities that address complex scientific use cases in the need of integrating and using multiple services from EOSC-hub and its partners.

The application should meet the following criteria.

• It represents a broader scenario that has impact across Europe and beyond.
• It is supported by a mature research infrastructures, a research organisation or a project at European/National level that is planning to consume the services in scope of the programme of over a longer period in time and who can demonstrate their engagement in EOSC or their willingness to be engaged.
• It is committed to publish or consume third-party research artefacts (e.g. publications, datasets, tools, workflows) following open science practices, also adhering to the Open Research Data Pilot in H2020 if applicable.
• It supports as broad a range of stakeholders as possible with maximum coverage of different types of research, services used and varieties of types of data, strengthening the consortium and fostering the EOSC uptake.
• It provides data integration, management, interoperability and analysis challenges  that will drive the specification of new integrated solutions to support the open science, fostering the interoperability between EOSC services.
• The research community resources (services, applications etc.) involved in the integration, have been  already operated in a technical environment demonstrating at least Technology Readiness Level 8. to be working on existing computational/data/connectivity and other infrastructures (e.g. private, national, European or public clouds/grids/HTC/HPC/network resources).
• The technical integration can be realistically  completed within the timeframe available (from 6 up to 12 months) with the proposed technical support from the applicant, and from EOSC-hub and its partners.

The selection will be conducted according to the following principles.

• Transparency: this transparency will be achieved by publishing the information on the successful applicants and the related scientific discipline, and providing individual feedback to all applicants.
• Expert assessment: the applications will be reviewed by experts with appropriate knowledge and experience. All the proposals will be assessed according to the same criteria.
• Equality: any specific regions, institutions or countries are advantaged. Science areas currently under-represented within EOSC-hub could be prioritized for the sake of a better coverage of all scientific disciplines.
• Excellence: the proposals will be evaluated according to their merit and their potential impact, like their contribution to European Societal Challenges.
• Prioritisation: the proposals will be ranked according to the selection criteria defined for the call.
• Confidentiality: the identity of reviewers will be protected.
• Management of conflicts of interests: reviewers will state any conflict of interest with the proposals assigned for their review. Conflicts of interest can be personal, professional, institutional or intellectual.
• The outcome of the selection process will be promptly and adequately notified.

How to apply?

Applicants will be requested to provide the following information in the application form before the deadline on 1 November 2019, 18:00 CET.

• Application title
• Principal Investigator and optional collaborators (Provide full names with affiliations)
• Describe the Project. Write a brief and plain explanation of the proposed project and the scientific or technical challenge it will address. Please specify how the research community will benefit from this project.
• Description of the services and the technical environment that the proposed project already has in place. Please, specify what kind of technology you are using (Grids, Cloud computing, HPC, HTC, data storage, data repositories, data management systems, data discovery services, etc.) and the related Technology Readiness Level (TRL) (please, provide evidence of the declared TRL with links to technical documentation, papers, etc)
• Explain what services and resources you are planning to use and integrate and the benefits that you are expecting from the new developed solution.
• Science Area (Please state the area of science of the project including one or more codes from the OECD Frascati Fields of Science most appropriate to the project, the codes can be consulted at https://www.oecd.org/science/inno/38235147.pdf)
• Expected scientific impact of using services, data and other research outputs from EOSC-hub and its partners
• Contribution to Open Access and FAIR
• Expected duration (from 6 to 12 months)
• Minimal Compute and Storage capacity needed for sustaining the Project (specify the minimum amount of resources needed to execute services involved in your project in terms of CPU cores, RAM, storage for data analysis)
• Compute and Storage capacity to fully scale-up the Project after the completion of the pilot (specify the amount of resources in terms of CPU cores, RAM, storage for data analysis needed to scale-up the existing facilities from your Project)
• Minimal storage capacity for long-term archiving for sustaining the Project (describe your data sets in volume and granularity and specify the minimum amount of archive storage as well as the access requirements for long-term archiving)
• Long-term data management policies and long-term archiving capacity required by  the Project (specify the amount of storage for long-term archiving and corresponding data policies )
• Mention any classified and/or privacy-sensitive data
• Any other requirements

APPLY NOW!

For further questions please contact early-adopter@mailman.eosc-hub.eu