A €30 million project to lay down the foundation for establishing EOSC as a federated infrastructure has concluded with nine key results to ensure its future smooth running, including technologies, services, policies and a service management system.
These key results provide scientists with a single entry point to dozens of different high-quality digital solutions, compute and data management and thematic services to create a portfolio of products through an integrated service catalogue and a comprehensive set of rules of participation to maintain safety and trust among users and the researchers making their data discoverable and accessible.
The move will enable researchers to tackle societal challenges and fundamental science quicker, like major diseases or climate change, by stimulating scientific research with better access to high-quality services and data that is findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR).
Among the services are a new Digital Innovation Hub (DIH) to help industrial R&D and academic research easily collaborate and access services, a series of advanced educational training courses and a clear set of governance to keep users of the cloud safe and accountable.
With collaboration from EGI, EUDAT and Indigo-DataCloud, the Horizon 2020 project developed its nine critical components to realize a ‘federated ecosystem based on data and other open science outputs, integrating many services such as data visualisation, analysis and physical resources to store and re-use data for open science’.
The EOSC-hub
Called ‘EOSC-hub’, this 3-year project to establish the marketplace and working environment for research data and software exploitation, has not only established the compute and storage e-infrastructures, software and data services, but also delivered services for federated authentication and authorization, accounting, monitoring and support, and the system of processes and policies necessary for the management of the EOSC Core – taking us a step closer to a fully-fledged EOSC.
EOSC-hub project coordinator, Tiziana Ferrari said: “The EOSC-hub has laid the foundations and backbone of Europe’s Open Science Cloud, making enormous strides for tackling Europe’s fragmented research ecosystem.”
“Researchers now not only have secure space and a system to work in but also broader access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries. They can be safe with our rules of participation when making their research discoverable and accessible. These rules have undergone extensive tests on prospective service providers and ensure that we maintain the trust for and from all potential users.”
EOSC-hub Project Director Per Öster also said, “The impact achieved by EOSC-hub was possible thanks to targeted support programmes for researchers and innovators all with the aim to put the researchers and the innovators in the driver’s seat: 8 competence centres that engaged major large research infrastructures, the EOSC Early Adopter Programme for research communities and the Digital Innovation Hub for SMEs and industry.”
The new services in the project have already supported more than 20,000 researchers carrying out millions of operations and computational jobs monthly, as well as integrating the data and applications of 14 new research infrastructures while training 5,200 people.
From a technical point of view, the project produced 18 interoperability guidelines, and integrated more than 80 service providers into the EOSC portfolio.
Additionally, the project supported COVID-19 international projects through thousands of molecular docking simulations runs that resulted in a huge increase in computational power collaboratively delivered by the EGI Federation and the Open Science Grid in the USA.
Commercial Collaboration
Although the EOSC is designed with supporting Europe’s publicly funded science research in mind, a key result of the EOSC-hub is the newly formed Digital Innovation Hub (DIH), a platform that makes it easier for commercial companies to access EOSC’s digital technologies and services.
Supporting industrial R&D and academic research in accessing and sharing EOSC tools and services, the digital hub allows research e-Infrastructures to support businesses to stimulate growth and innovation, leading to a cross-collaboration between the public and private sectors and helps start-ups and SMEs to access knowledge and technical services.
“The ultimate goal is to create a one-stop-shop that brings IT services, research data, technology and expertise into a single place to support innovation in the industry. Long term, we can provide a formalisation of the knowledge and expertise into procedure descriptions, standardised consulting offerings or certification schemes,” Ferrari said.
Full Nine Results
The nine Key Exploitable Results of EOSC-hub are:
Video - EOSC-hub Project
About EOSC-hub
EOSC-hub brings together multiple service providers to create the Hub: a single contact point for European researchers and innovators to discover, access, use and reuse a broad spectrum of resources for advanced data-driven research.
For researchers, this will mean broader access to services supporting their scientific discovery and collaboration across disciplinary and geographical boundaries.
The project mobilises providers from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and other major European research infrastructures to deliver a common catalogue of research data, services and software for research.
EOSC-hub collaborates closely with eInfraCentral, EOSCpilot, GÉANT 4.2, OpenAIRE-Advance and the RDA Europe 4.0 projects to deliver a consistent service offer for research communities across Europe.
EOSC-hub is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 777536. The generous EU funding received by the project is complemented with a contribution from the EGI Foundation and its participants, and in-kind contributions made available by service providers of the EGI Federation.