Access to commercial services through the EOSC hub

The action will cover the following activities:

• research activities for understanding how various needs from researchers can be aggregated and the complementary commercial services required to maximise the impact of the tools already available in the EOSC catalogue of services which enable inter-disciplinary research;
• technical integration of the complementary commercial services into the EOSC catalogue of services, including management of the access rights and establishment of appropriate legal agreements (contracts, service level agreements, etc.) that are necessary to make accessible the commercial services to the EOSC users; due consideration should be given to the use of open standards and interoperability of the services;
• provision of access to the services through the EOSC catalogue of services.

Proposals will address the availability of both types of services listed below:

a) Commodity type commercial digital services that are necessary

To achieve excellence in their research activities, researchers need to use a broad range of state-of-the-art services that sometimes are not made available by their public e-infrastructure facilities, either because not offered by them or because they are developed more efficiently by commercial operators. The challenge is to set-up a legal and technical mechanism to integrate these supplementary commercial services into the EOSC hub in order to make them available to the scientists.

• Set-up a value-added procurement mechanism for commercial services that creates economies of scale in procuring and brokering resources for the EOSC and helps optimising investments enabling long-term sustainability for the EOSC;
• Enable the creation of new market opportunities and new solutions by facilitating cross-fertilisation of heterogeneous data and services;
• Lower access barriers for scientific community to commercial services, including DIAS-supported added value services and enhance industry’s potential to take advantage of scientific market opportunities.