Less than 5 years to build the European Open Science Cloud

There are decades of lessons learnt and resources to build upon … where does the EOSCpilot project fit in?

According to a recent article in The Economist, the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data. Today Europe is the largest worldwide producer of scientific data, but an insufficient and fragmented infrastructure means that data is not being exploited to its full potential.

This represents just one of a number of the current challenges posed for Europe, along with inadequate awareness on the value of data and the incentives for data sharing, lack of common standards hindering the interoperability of data, and insufficient hardware capacity for scientific computing, storage, and connectivity. In addition, there is a real need to address the fragmentation and lack of coordination over different scientific communities and countries and to translate recent changes in privacy, data protection and copyright rules to the research data domain.

But this is where the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) comes into play, to strengthen Europe’s position in data-driven innovation, to improve competitiveness and cohesion and to help create a Digital Single Market. EOSC has the mission to create a federated, globally accessible, multidisciplinary environment where researchers, innovators, companies and citizens can publish, find, use and reuse each other’s data, tools, publications and other outputs for research, innovation and educational purposes.

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