The EOSC-Pillar consortium covers France, Germany, Italy, Austria and Belgium, which are among the European countries that are supposed to bring major contribution to the co-building of the EOSC, thanks to their relevant national resources related to open science. They are key players in the fields of Research and Data Infrastructures, e-Infrastructures, HPC and are investing considerable resources in research and innovation. The consortium was built with two objectives in mind:

  • Facilitating the liaison with budding national initiatives for the coordination of data and open science services, which are at the heart of the project concept.
  • Ensuring the complementarity of competences and expertise, while including the point of view of the key stakeholders represented in the national initiatives (namely involving key research communities alongside e-Infrastructures and data service providers).

Involvement of National Initiatives

Majority of the consortium is built up by key members of the Italian, French, and German initiatives while the Austrian and Belgian partners are at the forefront of the evolution of similar initiatives in their countries. Therefore, they are well placed to have a direct impact on the open science and data strategies, the technical and policy decisions, and the engagement of stakeholders in their country.

Participation of Research Communities and Stakeholders

In relation to the second aspect, the members of the consortium can approximately be divided in three categories: large research organisations, data producers and maintainers, e-Infrastructures’ owners and maintainers, while some of the larger organisations belong to more than one of these categories (e.g. CNR and CNRS). In particular, the consortium benefits from the participation of several mature scientific communities that will be involved in all phases of service implementation, starting from the design. In our opinion, this marks an important difference in comparison to more technology-driven approaches, that while not necessarily wrong, may well find difficulties in tailoring the proposed solutions to the live research communities who should use them.

Consortium Partner

Activities

GARR is the Project Coordinator of EOSC-Pillar. It coordinates and manages the project, supports national initiatives, and provides services for academia and research.

Leading the work on the development, operation and training of common tools for coordinated FAIR research data provisioning and for transparent access to them. CNR also leads the development of National service registries.

CINECA will mainly contribute to the infrastructure layer work in EOSC-Pillar, particularly in the design, integration and operation in federated services.

INFN will support the integration of national/regional services with their  EOSC-hub counterparts, support the consolidation of national initiatives; lead the work on providing guidance and procedures for integrating services.

INFN will also provide support to the delivery of the Use Case on exploring reference data through existing computing services for the bioinformatics community. INFN will also work on extending national services at European level, to improve findability and interoperability of heritage science data across Europe and will aggregate research communities to establish a Europe-wide heritage science cloud-based knowledge base. INFN will also lead the work on integrating heterogenous data on cultural heritage.

CMCC contributes to the community outreach activities and promotion of FAIR practices while also contributing to the national service registry.

Contribution to the involvement of user communities and scientific data services in the testing and fine- tuning of the solutions proposed. CMCC will also contribute to the use case on Agile FAIR data for environment and earth system communities.

UNIVIE manages the work on the National Initiatives Survey of EOSC-Pillar. They also provide data and structured information for academia and research, analysis of outcomes of survey and its coordination. 
 

CINES leads the overall technical management of EOSC-Pillar. They will also define common tools and frameworks to describe, enroll and support national service or data providers.

Their activities will enable the shift from national to international scale, when a service is adopted by a wider community.

CNRS leads the overall work of EOSC-Pillar on delivering the Infrastructure Layer, delivering horizontal data storage and computing services, from national to transnational.

They evolve national services to make them available on European level to a broad range of communities and enable the transnational uptake of services. CNRS also evaluates existing business models and provides recommendations for the EOSC.

INRAE supports the work of EOSC-Pillar on its infrastructure layer and use cases by providing data and data services that have to be integrated in the EOSC data ecosystem
INRIA leads the delivery of one of the use cases dealing with software source code deposit, access, and preservation integration into EOSC eTDR.

IFREMER contributes to evaluating existing business models and that provide recommendations for the EOSC.

IFREMER will also support the evolution of national and European marine services to make them available on a European level to a broad range of communities. Additionally, their work also enables the transnational uptake of services.

INSERM connects FAIR principles to the requirements and specificities of the health research domain through leading the delivery of a use case (Exploring reference data through existing computing services for the bioinformatics community) and contributing to other use cases.

INSERM also contributes to EOSC-Pillar's work on establishing FAIR data services at the national and transnational level and delivering horizontal data storage and computing services.

KIT leads the EOSC-Pillar work on access policies, authorization and authentication models, privacy and legal, policy and legal framework, delivery of Training modules on FAIR-oriented research data management tools and solutions, launch and management of the Open Call for additional services or use cases and integration of national services and federated service management.

DKRZ contributes to several use cases on climate data use case and infrastructure experience,as well as the implementation of relevant RDA recommendations. DKRZ also contributes to the work on EOSC-Pillar's common tools and mechanisms for FAIR research data consumers with its EUDAT B2FIND expertise.

Fraunhofer's work deals with cross domain Interoperability based on ontology, integrating domain and regional data resources. They lead EOSC-Pillar's work on establishing FAIR data.

Additionally Fraunhofer is also involved in contributing towards common access to federated repositories, ontology training, and enforce data provenance for thematic communities and beyond.

GFZ leads the work on two use cases: suitable data formats for seismological big data provisioning via web services and Virtual definition of big datasets at seismological data centres according to RDA recommendations.

They also support the work on promoting the adoption of FAIR data practices for Earth sciences by means of suitable services to define virtual datasets and encourages the application of proper FAIR Management of Big Data for existing data services.

UGent leads the work on EOSC-Pillar's helpdesk and documentation for promoting FAIR practices and support to FAIR-oriented data stewardship.

They also contribute to the dissemination, outreach and community building activities, the National initiatives Survey, research data management and support for the work on legal frameworks.

Trust-IT manages EOSC-Pillar 's communications strategy and stakeholder engagement. It leads the Dissemination, Outreach and Community-building work package.

It also supports the Project Office as it leads the innovation management activity. Trust-IT also contributes to the National Initiatives Survey and National Initiatives to Trans-National Services work packages.