What Is the Added Value of EOSC?

The attractiveness of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) depends on its content, on the data and services it offers. Many different projects contribute to EOSC, but there are a lot of similarities as well as common challenges they have to face.

Therefore, it is important to come up with common categories and rules for processes, quality and governance, Matti Heikkurinen, Innovation Manager at EGI Foundation emphasized during the EOSC Symposium in Budapest, Hungary. As EOSC is in the implementation phase, at the moment discussions can be initiated and commonalities can be verified.

According to Pauli Assinen, Head of Development at the University of Helsinki, the big question is how users can discover and access services. As many researchers don’t know about EOSC yet, local support would be needed to reach out to them. According to his experience, people mostly want information about services. He summarized his advice in three words: “connect, communicate, cooperate”.

EUDAT’s Anna-Lena Flügel agreed with him. As she said, communication with research communities is essential because they can give feedback for example about whether they feel that they are represented enough.

As researchers are the key, they need to see the value of the service, Kevin Ashley, Director of the Digital Curation Centre added. According to his experience, trainings are very useful, because knowledge can be spread through consultancy.

From the point of view of service providers, EOSC brings together infrastructures and important players in the field. However, “if we want to make it an exciting adventure to join EOSC, then big resources, high computing power to process data should be available for the users,” Dick Schaap from MARIS said.

Nevertheless, a list of services is not enough, focusing on the practice of researchers is needed, Matej Ďurčo, Head of the technical working group “Tools, Services & Systems” at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities added. According to him, service providers can profit from EOSC because it boosts visibility and discoverability.

Alberto Azevedo, Oceanographer at the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering in Lisbon, Portugal agreed with him, but, according to him, in addition to visibility, most providers need to increase their capacity in computational power. So, there is a need for infrastructures with reliable core services as well as a need to simplify the implementation of these services.

At the same time, the EOSC Portal should ensure high quality, and quality verification should also be governed. Sy Holsinger, Senior Policy and Strategy Officer at the EGI Foundation argued for the need to adopt a common service management framework, which helps adopting a terminology that makes discussion much more effective.

Ilona von Stein, Project Leader at DANS talked about the project FAIRsFAIR that supports a FAIR certification system for repositories, which helps keeping the data FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable). This would clearly boost trust, and they are already working on the evaluation and certification of individual data sets. The aim is to provide a trusted framework for EOSC users, with focusing on a generic approach, but engaging communities and paying attention to specific needs at the same time.

However, FAIR criteria should not be top-down, defined by EU bureaucrats, Edit Herczog, Founder of Vision & Values SPRL said. In her words, “everyone should be part of it” and give feedback, and a consensus should define these criteria.

Furthermore, criteria for services and softwares are also needed to ensure their quality, Mario David, Researcher Associate / IT Manager at LIP Lisbon concluded.

Please find more details about the session at this link.