European Open Science Cloud for Research

The aim of this topic is the launch of a pilot action that should demonstrate how wide availability of scientific data and data-analysis services for European researchers can be ensured through a cloud infrastructure.

Proposals should address the federation, networking and coordination of existing research infrastructures and scientific clouds for the purpose of increasing data findability, accessibility and interoperability, improving the services provided to research communities, and facilitating re-use of data by a wider user community. Trust, easy accessibility and use by researchers should be duly taken into account. Particular attention should be paid to storage, access and re-use needs for data and knowledge from Horizon 2020 projects, as well as to the needs of the ‘long tail of science’, including orphaned scientific communities.

The action should build on existing infrastructures and design a stakeholder driven governance framework, with the involvement of the research user community, the research infrastructures and the research funding bodies to ensure its sustainability. Links with related national and European initiatives should be established. Links should also be established with projects selected under topic EINFRA-12-2017, to collaborate, exploit potential synergies and ensure complementarity.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU of between EUR 5 and 10 million would allow this topic to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

Research Infrastructures such as the ones on the ESFRI roadmap and others, are characterised by the very significant data volumes they generate and handle. These data are of interest to thousands of researchers across scientific disciplines and to other potential users via Open Access policies. Effective data preservation and open access for immediate and future sharing and re-use is a fundamental component of today’s research infrastructures and Horizon 2020 actions. In this context, European research stakeholders make increasing use of cloud services to effectively handle such data.

• Facilitate access of researchers across all scientific disciplines to the broadest possible set of data and to other resources needed for data driven science to flourish.
• Provide a governance and business model that sets the rules for the use of data, deals with issues related to privacy, sensitivity, copyright and security and oversees the provision of services (business and governance layer).
• Create a cross-border and multi-disciplinary open innovation environment for research data, knowledge and services with engaged stakeholders and organisations.
• Foster the establishment of global standards, ontologies and interoperability for scientific data.