Enhancing the European Open Science Cloud: EOSC Future has open calls until March

Calls will offer up to 15 grants for working groups and communities of practice

LC
Lorena Caliman
28 january, 2022≈ 5 min read

Providing a European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) focused on technology, interoperability, resource availability, user engagement and user experience is one of the central goals of the EOSC Future project (2021-2023), funded by the Horizon 2020 programme. The project, aligned with the EOSC proposal and outlined to enable its best development, aims to bring together a wide variety of stakeholders, infrastructures and e-infrastructures, and diverse scientific communities, to produce an environment that meets the real needs of users/researchers.

As part of its strategy and roadmap, divided into three phases and officially launched in September 2021, the EOSC Future project has two calls of the "RDA Open Calls" series open until 21 March: the RDA communities of practice and the RDA working groups. Both calls, in cooperation with the experienced Research Data Alliance community (existing since 2013), intend to strengthen the relationship of scientific communities with the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and the improvement and development of its functionalities.

RDA Calls

In the calls open until 21 March, the aim is to offer, through the experience of the Research Data Alliance's global community, greater involvement and contribution of scientific communities to the development of the EOSC.

The call for working groups invites individual researchers and research groups to develop data and research infrastructure solutions to support the EOSC. The groups, from specific domains and disciplines, should: enable solutions to support EOSC technical developments; address social barriers to accessing EOSC; increase community engagement and participation in EOSC; complement existing EOSC working groups and support structures within the RDA.

Submissions should be focused on a set of topics related to services, projects, training and development of EOSC services and approaches, as well as its working groups and strategic agenda.

The call for working groups will issue up to 10 grants of max. €15 000, during the lifetime of the EOSC Future project (until 2023). The groups are expected to last from 12 to 18 months. More details here.

The EOSC Future call for RDA communities of practice seeks experts and skilled communicators in various research fields, to serve as a focal point for coordination between their professional communities and the wider EOSC community. The dedicated communities will contribute by providing domain and discipline-specific knowledge and skills in EOSC; engaging users and providers in EOSC; and strengthening alignment across national, regional and discipline-specific lines.

Successful applications will be expected to prepare a detailed plan, building on outcomes related to the consolidation of new research communities around EOSC; disciplinary developments supporting existing EOSC science clusters; transdisciplinary approaches of benefit to EOSC; and global approaches, including open research commons initiatives.

The call for communities of practice will award up to 5 grants, each totalling a maximum of €7,500, over the course of the EOSC Future project. Individuals or groups with a level of expertise in their respective fields or disciplines, as well as committed to FAIR and other principles dear to RDA, can apply. More details here.

About EOSC Future

The proposal of EOSC is to provide European researchers, innovators, companies and citizens with a federated and open multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and re-use FAIR data, tools and services for research, innovation and educational purposes. The EOSC Future project is funded through the Horizon 2020 programme and officially started in September 2021. It aims to integrate, consolidate and connect infrastructures, research communities and open science initiatives to further develop the EOSC portal, the EOSC-Core, EOSC-Exchange projects and EOSC itself.

The project wants to respond to researchers’ evolving needs while keeping up with technological advances and the wider policy landscape. Therefore, the work of the EOSC Future project is structured around six thematic pillars:

- Policy and Strategy

- Technology and Interoperability

- Excellent Science

- Co-Development and Procurement

- Skills and Training

- User Engagement

Through its roadmap, EOSC Future plans to deliver improvements to EOSC in three phases. Each of the EOSC releases will introduce enhanced functionality for users and providers, enabling greater and improved resource availability, sharing, discovery and recomposability. The project roadmap is divided across the different aspects of the EOSC environment: resource sharing and discovery, resource allocation, resource composition, enabling services to operate on the EOSC (EOSC-Core), resource and service registration (EOSC-Exchange), EOSC science groups and projects, and interoperability. More details here.

The EOSC Future's development framework and relationship in line with the entire EOSC framework can be viewed below:

The EOSC Future project has 35 partners. It will unlock the potential of European research through a vision of Open Science for Society. The project builds on eight main goals ranging from delivering and operating EOSC-Core, expanding EOSC-Exchange, extending resources to provide an execution framework for EOSC, increasing the impact of European research, promoting commercial sector participation in EOSC, providing support and training to users and service providers, engaging with communities and aligning the strategic vision of EOSC. More details on the EOSC Future vision and objectives are available at this link.