The European Research Area (ERA) is a unified research area open to the world, in which researchers, scientific knowledge and technology circulate freely.
Through ERA, the Union and its Member States will strengthen their scientific and technological bases, their competitiveness and their capacity to collectively address grand challenges.
In addition to ERA there are two key European priorities where sharing data, publishing in the open and principles of open science play a role: Europe's digital and green transition manifested via two initiatives of Europe fit for the digital age and the European Green Deal.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is grounded in the EC’s aim to promote the access and reuse of research data which comes out of publicly funded research. At present, there is fragmented access to research data, which exists, stored and is created in many different data centres, institutions and research centres across Europe. Open access to this data is not a given, and the content is not interoperable, restricting inter-disciplinary research.
EOSC will solve this problem by providing easy access to this data, making publicly funded data open. It will provide one single point of free access, ensuring all databases are interoperable. The push therefore for a recognition of the benefits of Open Science - policies and infrastructures - is key.
EOSC consists of two parts: the EOSC Core and the EOSC Exchange. The EOSC Core implements the underlying components to make the connections work (EOSC Interoperability Framework, AAI, Catalogue & Marketplace for common data and service provisioning, accounting and monitoring, PID system, helpdesk), while the EOSC Exchange is the place where data and services are shared via established access protocols.
Resources for more information: EOSC Portal, EOSC Architecture
EOSC is a co-programme partnership, and as such, the EC and MS/AC are jointly putting resources towards its implementation based on the SRIA and MAR. On the EC side this takes place through the Horizon Europe programme Research Infrastructures pillar and on the MS/AC side through national funding that mirrors EC's actions, with investments matching national priorities.
How is OpenAIRE involved: Read here.
How is OpenAIRE involved? OpenAIRE builds infrastructure for Open Scholarly Communication and Open Science and we care about indicators for openness. OpenAIRE Graph and our efforts in building a Metrics Data Space that include Open Science in the upcoming Horizon Europe GraspOS project will contribute to the quantitiative indicators.
The EU is creating a single market for data so that data can flow within the EU countries and across sectors. To make this happen the EC is putting in place a strategy and action to implement Data Spaces, which will essentially pool European data in key sectors, to make it interoperable and usable in a trusted way.
The data spaces will include:
The key principles to build these data spaces are: data control, governance, Respect of EU rules and values, Technical data infrastructure, Interconnection and interoperability, Openness.
The EC has in plans the creation of 9 data spaces, one of which is EOSC as the science, research and innovation data space:
Several EU horizontal programmes will support the development of common European data spaces through various funding actions, in particular with regard to building the necessary data infrastructure – notably, DIGITAL for digital deployment initiatives, the Horizon Europe programme for research and innovation and the Connecting Europe Facility for digital infrastructures. The recovery plans of several Member States also support actions on European data spaces.
It is too early to tell. The data spaces will be supported and coordinated by the Data Spaces Support Center, funded by the European Commission.
How is OpenAIRE involved? OpenAIRE is a key service provider in EOSC, which will share data and tooling with the emerging data spaces. As such, we follow the guidance on architecture, interoperabilty, legal and ethical topics on sharing and our role is to bring alignment.
UNESCO has undertaken the role of fostering Open Science at a global scale. It currently faciliates the global alignment through the following activities:
OpenAIRE has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under Grant Agreements No. 777541 and 101017452 (see all).
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