The EOSC-hub week: a flurry of EOSC Energy

From the 16th to the 20th of April 2018, Malaga was the cradle of the first EOSC-hub week. The event, cosponsored by the EGI Foundation, the EUDAT CDI and the XDC project, was the first of a series of annual meetings that the EOSC-hub project will organise to bring together service providers, representatives of research communities and policy makers to discuss and advance the establishment of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). 

Around 170 stakeholders had the opportunity to hear about the results of the consultation process launched in April 2016 now captured in the Implementation Roadmap for the European Science Cloud from Augusto Burgueño Arjona, Head of the “eInfrastructure” Unit at the European Commission (DG CONNECT). The Implementation Roadmap was adopted on 14 March 2018 as part of the Staff Working document of the European Commission. Burgueño Arjona described the possible EOSC model as “a pan-European federation of data infrastructures built around a federating core and providing access to a wide range of publicly funded services supplied at national, regional and institutional levels, and to complementary commercial services”. He also highlighted the six actions lines, fundamental for the EOSC implementation, according to the staff document: (a) architecture, (b) data, (c) services, (d) access and interfaces, (e) rules and (f) governance. According to Burgueño Arjona, joining EOSC is a decision up to the stakeholders that are also free to decide about their level of participation. The level or rules of participation is one of the focal topics under the radar of the 2nd HighLevel Expert Group (HLEG) on EOSC.

During the EOSC-hub week, Isabel Campos, CSIC and member of the HLEG, highlighted a number of recommendations from the report and some of the “EOSC in practice” stories there collected. The interim report will be published on the 11th of June on the occasion of the EOSC Summit in Brussels. A public, on-line consultation platform will be launched at the summit to allow for a transparent feedback from the stakeholders willing to contribute to the building of a flexible and adaptable pan-European federation of data infrastructures.

The opening dedicated to the EOSC landscape set the scene for the Project Coordinator Tiziana Ferrari (EGI Technical Director), and for the Project Director, Per Öster (CSC Director) to showcase what the EOSC-hub project is doing to support and implement the EOSC vision. The major achievements highlighted by Ferrari and Öster were: the EOSC-hub service catalogue, the unique access point for all the EOSC horizontal and thematic services, the EOSC-hub marketplace, the gateway to procure the EOSC-hub resources (ready by the end of 2018) and the progresses on the collaboration with other H2020 implementation initiatives including: OpenAIRE-Advance, eInfraCentral, EOSCpilot, RDA-Europe 4 and several ESFRI projects.

The EOSC week continued with a set of sessions dedicated to hot-topics such as: how scientific communities can participate in the EOSC-hub and EOSCpilot projects; the rules to engage stakeholders in EOSC-hub; the role of the ESFRI projects in the EOSC-hub context; understanding the demand for digital services in research and the role of public procurement and the initial EOSC-hub AAI architecture.

Have a look at the presentations and outcomes of sessions.