News

Published

Oct 8, 2019

Author

Eleni Koulocheri

A ‘Common Vision for EOSC’ White Paper

Oct 8, 2019

“OpenAIRE Advance and EOSC hub are committed to the vision of EOSC in order to support the provision of scientific data in a robust and federated way. In this context, I am happy to announce the publication of the White Paper “Common Vision, Service Provision, and Role in the EOSC Governance”, prepared in conjunction with our colleagues from EOSC hub. The white paper is an output of our Joint Activity Plan and advances the strategic alignment of the two projects.” – Wolfram Horstmann, Director, Göttingen State and University Library.

The work kick-started in November last year and involved fifteen experts representing the EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE-Advance projects, as well as their underlying e-Infrastructures, the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud, and OpenAIRE.

Priorities

The white paper highlights a number of priorities, which need to be tackled, to ensure an effective implementation of the EOSC vision. In our view, the wider EOSC community should focus on:

Increasing the accessibility and usability and capacities of all facilities contributing to the EOSC landscape (for example, the EOSC Portal and its components the Marketplace and the Catalogue).
Defining an operational budget in EOSC to cover: access-enabling services and processes, and, increase capacity and/or new capabilities complementing what is already funded at a national and European-level.
Ensuring the commitment of long-term funding for the sustainability of the EOSC landscape, independent from short-term projects.
Defining a clear contact point for each e-infrastructure for strategic steering purposes.

Actions

Moving theory into practice, the white paper suggests a number of concrete actions for EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE-Advance, closely related to the priorities listed above:

Provide input to an EOSC charter on how to increase accessibility, efficiency, effectiveness, transparency and simplicity of EOSC services for each individual researcher.
Provide strategic advice to the EOSC Governance with the support of their national constituents from the academic and research community in the form of a research and academic infrastructure situation report.
Provide business plans for EOSC services operations.
Leverage self-organization principles to form a strategic point of contact to infrastructures for the EOSC Governance Board to interact with.

What's next?

Within this framework, EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE-Advance can kick-start the implementation of the recommendations of the white paper by:

Adding the identified actions to the EOSC-hub and OpenAIRE-Advance Joint Activity Plan.
Further formalize and encourage the cooperation of our constituent legal entities to address issues beyond the EC projects.
Jointly seek dialogue with the EC and the EOSC Governance.

Prof Wolfram Horstmann is the Director of the Göttingen State and University Library and the Scientific Coordinator of OpenAIRE Advance.
The White Paper “Common Vision, Service Provision, and Role in the EOSC Governance” was edited by Tiina Kupila-Rantala (ESCO-hub) and Wolfram Horstmann and benefitted from contributions and revisions provided by Magchiel Bijsterbosch, Matthew Dovey, Ilaria Fava, Tiziana Ferrari, Luciano Gaido, Damien Lecarpentier, Yannick Legré, Paolo Manghi, Natalia Manola, Naija Rettberg, Dale Robertson, Per Öster and Tiina Timonen.