Federating Core Governance and Sustainability

Dale Robertson invites EOSC stakeholders to provide feedback on an EOSC-hub briefing paper. Deadline for contribution is the 25th of August!

EOSC-hub has produced a Briefing Paper which proposes an open and participatory approach to the definition and provisioning of the EOSC Federating Core based on existing capabilities of e-Infrastructures and research infrastructures at national and European level. We now invite all stakeholders to provide feedback and insight.

The paper puts forward a proposed definition of the Federating Core of the EOSC and proposals for its governance and sustainability. The initial proposals for the definition and organisation of the EOSC Federating Core capabilities have been developed from the recommendations of the HLEG EOSC final report and the EOSCpilot project,  as well as from research communities from a broad range of scientific disciplines within and outside the EOSC-hub consortium. 

The Federating Core includes the technical, human, policy and resource-related elements which are needed to allow research-targetted services to operate.  It is proposed to consist of tiers which deliver three sets of capabilities. These are defined in the Briefing Paper, but are summarised here:

• The Hub Portfolio, consisting of the activities and tools to provide coordinated access and management of resources provided by multiple suppliers. The Hub Portfolio delivers the EOSC “federating tier”.
• Shared Resources, which include the scientific outputs (data, applications, software, pipelines etc) and the storage and compute hosting platforms needed to deposit, share and process these outputs. The Shared Resources realise the EOSC “resource tier”.
• The Compliance Framework, which defines the policies and processes for the demand side and supply side to engage with EOSC. It includes the Rules of Participation, the Service Management System and related policies. The Compliance Framework provides the EOSC “regulatory tier”.

The Federating Core is proposed to be complemented by the EOSC Service Portfolio which will provide additional added-value services (common and thematic) which exploit the Federating Core and are discoverable, selected, customised and instantiated through the EOSC Portal, to address the needs of specific user communities. Together, the EOSC Federating Core and EOSC Service portfolio will enable the management of the full research data lifecycle.

Following the HLEG recommendations, we propose that the entire EOSC Federating Core is entrusted to the governance of the EOSC. 

The proposals are contained in the EOSC-hub Briefing Paper – EOSC Federating Core Governance and Sustainability.

The challenges of creating a sustainable EOSC are such that they should be tackled by an overarching collaboration of EOSC stakeholders. The proposals in the paper are put forward for further discussion, and feedback is welcome. We propose this briefing paper to initiate a community activity aiming at discussing and evolving the Federating Core concept, which should ultimately be reflected in a community position paper. A consultation on the proposals has been launched to collect feedback from stakeholders. Your feedback is very welcome.

PROVIDE INPUT NOW!

Dale Robertson is Open Science Policy Senior Analyst at Jisc and leads EOSC-hub task 2.3 (Governance and Sustainability) in WP2 (Strategy and Business Development).