European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)
The goal of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to provide European researchers, companies and citizens with a federated and open multidisciplinary environment in which they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research, innovation and education purposes. It aims to do this across borders and scientific disciplines by bringing together existing scientific data infrastructures from different disciplines and EU member states.
All information on this and available resources can be found on the EOSC Portal.
EOSC Association
The EOSC Association has been established in July 2020 together with four partners - CESAER, CSIC, GARR and GÉANT - to manage the EOSC. Since then, it has grown by over 200 members as well as members with observer status. These are jointly responsible for achieving the goals agreed in the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the European Union and the EOSC Association to form the official partnership. Interested organisations are invited to join the EOSC Association as a member or observer.
Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation / EOSC Support Office Austria
The Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation and the EOSC Support Office Austria emerged against the background of the formation of the EOSC as well as the EOSC Association. The members of the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation strive for a coordinated development of the Austrian Open Science Policy and EOSC goals. The EOSC Support Office Austria, on the other hand, is the operational unit of the Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation, which is legally administered by the ACONET Association. The participation of further institutions in the Austrian EOSC initiative is explicitly desired.
For questions or comments, please don't hesitate to contact the EOSC Support Office Austria.
The Austrian initiative is driven by the commitment to the Open Science movement as well as to the Vienna Declaration on the EOSC:
"The vision of Open Science is to make scientific processes more open and effective and to use both scientific excellence and open innovative and applied research to overcome current challenges, which are very comprehensively outlined in the policies of the EU Commission and in the framework of the Global Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)."
(see the German press release Austrian EOSC Mandated Organisation offiziell gegründet - ein Meilenstein für Open Science)
Development of EOSC
The EOSC initiative has been proposed in 2016 by the European Commission as part of the European Cloud Initiative to build a competitive data and knowledge economy in Europe. An extensive consultation with scientific and institutional stakeholders took place in 2016 and 2017. The summary outcome of the consultation was presented in March 2018 by the European Commission in the form of a roadmap for implementing the EOSC. In November 2018, the EOSC Governance was launched at the University of Vienna.
In this context the H2020 project "EOSCsecretariat.eu" addressed the need for the set-up of an operational framework supporting the overall governance of the EOSC. The article Developing EOSC (published in ACOnet's Annual Report 2019) gives a comprehensive overview of the EOSC governance structures and the status of developments from 2019 to 2020. In July 2020, the management of the EOSC was taken over by the EOSC Association.
Further information
A short introduction to EOSC is offered by three video interviews with the Austrian Country Delegate to the EOSC Governance Board, Stefan Hanslik from the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research:
The videos were produced within the Austrian role as partner in the H2020 project "EOSCsecretariat.eu". They are licensed with an open CC-license, so we encourage further reuse and dissemination.