The European Commission adopted the implementation roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud

The European Commission recently adopted the Implementation Roadmap for the European Science Cloud. The document gives an overview of six actions lines for the implementation of the EOSC: architecture, data, services, access & interfaces, rules and governance. It also describes the measures taken under Horizon 2020 Work Programmes to start implementing the European Open Science Cloud, which has now become a policy priority for European research and innovation.

The objective of the EOSC is to give the European Union a global lead in research data management and ensure that European scientists reap the full benefits of data-driven science, by offering ‘1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science and technology a virtual environment with free at the point of use, open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines”(Implementation Roadmap for the European Science Cloud).

The document also states that “the EOSC will be a fundamental enabler of open science and of the digital transformation of science, offering every European researcher the possibility to access and reuse all publically funded research data in Europe, across disciplines and borders”.

In practice, this is currently being implemented in the context of the EOSC-hub project, which started in January 2018 and is led by the EGI Foundation. The scope of EOSC-hub is to create the integration and service management structure of the European Open Science Cloud. The hub will act as an entry point for researchers and innovators to discover, access, and use a variety of advanced data-driven resources.

EOSC-hub will also provide an access channel complementing the access mechanisms in use at different data infrastructures, and additional services such as a marketplace, authentication and authorisation and security services, allowing users to access the computing, data and services of pan-European and disciplinary research data infrastructures, which already federate data infrastructures at the European level. A catalogue of EOSC services – accessible through the EOSC-hub marketplace - for data storage, management and analytics, simulation and visualisation, distributed computing, etc. will help researchers to discover, select and use the services they need.