European Open Science Cloud (EOSC)

Summary

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud), promoted by the European Commission since 2016, is the reference federated ecosystem that enables European researchers to find, share and reuse research data and services from any discipline and country, with the aim of building a “Web of FAIR Data and Services” for science in Europe.

Promoting organizations

EOSC is co-governed by three main actors that make up its tripartite governance:

European Commission (through DG RTD (Directorate-General for Research and Innovation) and DG CNECT (Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology)). It provides political leadership for EOSC, funds it through Horizon Europe (the EU’s 2021–2027 framework programme for research and innovation), and is the promoter of the EOSC EU Node.
EOSC Association (EOSC-A) (EOSC Association): a non-profit organisation founded in 2020 that brings together universities, research centres, scientific infrastructures and technology organisations from more than 40 European countries. It coordinates the implementation of the EOSC Partnership through its Working Groups (working groups) and Task Forces (task forces for specific activities).
EOSC Steering Board (European Commission expert group) (reference E03756) composed of representatives from the 27 EU Member States and Horizon Europe associated countries. It provides strategic advice on EU policy on research data infrastructures and services, and supports the Commission in coordinating and implementing EOSC within the framework of the ERA Policy Agenda (European Research Area Policy Agenda).

Together, these three actors form the “Tripartite Group” (tripartite group), formally established in April 2024 to take strategic decisions on the EOSC Federation.

Objectives

EOSC addresses a structural challenge in European science: digital research outputs (including publications, data and software) are distributed across institutional, national and disciplinary infrastructures that are not always interoperable, which makes discovery, access and reuse difficult. EOSC is conceived as a federated and trusted environment (a “system of systems”) that connects existing repositories and infrastructures through shared rules, standards and common services, offering the research community more integrated access to resources and services across disciplines and borders. Its approach is not to build a single central infrastructure from scratch, but to federate what already exists and complement it with common components, so that it functions as a federated and interoperable data space. Its reference framework is the FAIR principles (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable), which set out how scientific data should be managed and published to maximise impact and reuse (including machine use whenever possible).

The EOSC Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) is aimed at meeting three general objectives (the EOSC objective tree) that respond to three main challenges: people (scientists and data professionals), knowledge (publications, data and software) and infrastructures. Overall, EOSC seeks to make open science the normal way of working, to ensure that research outputs are reusable (also by machines) through common standards and services, and to federate European infrastructures so they are available across disciplines and borders.

GENERAL OBJECTIVES

Open science as the “new normal”: ensuring that open science practices and skills are taught and rewarded, so that they become standard practice.
Real reuse through standards, tools and services: defining standards and developing tools and services so that researchers can find, access, reuse and combine research outputs, prioritising effective uptake.
A federated and sustainable infrastructure: establishing a sustainable, federated infrastructure that enables open and trustworthy sharing of scientific outputs by connecting existing repositories and services in an interoperable environment.

SPECIFIC OBJECTIVES

Increase “as open as possible” outputs from publicly funded research (understanding “outputs” as a broad set of digital research products).
Increase the availability of data management specialists (and equivalent professional profiles) to support open science within organisations.
Develop and adopt incentives (assessment, careers, recognition) that drive open science practice.
Ensure that a growing amount of data (and progressively other digital products) is FAIR by design (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable).
Strengthen the EOSC interoperability framework to support more types and volumes of FAIR digital objects (including data and software), incorporating common quality criteria.
Make more services and resources available that enable discovery and reuse of European research within and across disciplines.
Ensure that EOSC becomes operational as a stable and valuable infrastructure, especially for research oriented towards societal challenges.
Implement key functionalities for end users in the public and private sectors, in a way that complements other European data spaces.
Strengthen international links with initiatives in other regions and global cooperation in open science.

In addition, the SRIA defines 14 operational objectives that specify “how” the objectives above are delivered. They include, among others: deploying a minimum viable EOSC; establishing rules of participation and onboarding processes for providers; enabling common components such as identity and access management, persistent identifiers, minimum metadata and shared mechanisms for discovery and access; developing technical components of the FAIR ecosystem and metrics and certification frameworks; promoting pan-European infrastructures for scientific software; creating recognition and reward frameworks; and ensuring monitoring, user feedback and sustainable models for provision and cross-border cost sharing.

Beneficiaries and stakeholders

The main beneficiaries are the research community and their research organisations, which need to discover, access and reuse data, software and services in a federated environment.

Key stakeholders include research funders and science policy makers, together with infrastructures (service providers) and repositories that integrate resources into EOSC, and, increasingly, the public and private sectors and citizens as end users.

Results

Initial phase (2016 to 2020): foundational projects
In the initial implementation phase, the European Commission invested around €250 million under Horizon 2020 to prototype EOSC components through project calls and to prepare strategic guidance for the subsequent stage. The most representative projects in this phase include EOSCpilot, EOSC hub, OpenAIRE, eInfraCentral, FREYA and FAIRsFAIR, together with thematic clusters linked to major European research infrastructures (EOSC Life, SSHOC, ESCAPE, PaNOSC and ENVRI FAIR) and national or regional coordination projects such as EOSC Nordic, EOSC Pillar and EOSC Synergy.

Current phase (2021 to 2030): the Partnership and the build up of the EOSC Federation
Since 2021, EOSC has been structured through the Partnership (2021 to 2030), with planning driven by the SRIA and its Multi Annual Roadmap (MAR), and with a Macro Roadmap that functions as a living catalogue of outputs and contributions (projects, working groups and in kind contributions).

In parallel, the EOSC Federation is in its build up phase, formally launched in March 2025. The Federation is organised into node types:

EOSC EU Node: the first operational node, funded by the European Commission, which acts as the reference node of the federation and the first access point to the catalogue of European research services and datasets.
National nodes: Finland, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia and SURF (the Netherlands) are the first national nodes in active build up.
Thematic nodes: BBMRI ERIC (biobanks), CERN, DataTerra, Digital Twin of the Ocean, Life Sciences Connect and PaNOSC (photon and neutron science).
E infrastructure node: EUDAT.

Challenges

The main challenges identified in the SRIA to deliver EOSC are: (1) adoption and cultural change, meaning convincing the research community and aligning incentives so that open science becomes the norm, while also creating new professional roles (for example, data stewards); (2) interoperability and reuse, enriching data, publications and software so that they can be used by people and machines through widely adopted standards and practices; and (3) federation and coordination, aligning institutional, national and regional initiatives to reduce fragmentation, avoiding divergent approaches and achieving convergence on standards through long consensus-building processes. Added to these are challenges related to sustainability and political and financial support, as well as security and risk management (cybersecurity, service continuity, disaster recovery) needed to operate EOSC reliably.

Evidence of success

EOSC progress can be justified with institutional evidence (agreements and governance), operational evidence (services in production and shared guidance) and community evidence (events and scaling mechanisms). Taken together, they show the transition from a prototyping phase to a federated deployment phase with shared rules and planned expansion.

Partnership formalised: there is a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the European Commission and the EOSC Association that frames cooperation within the Partnership.
Reference node in production: the EOSC EU Node moved to full production in 2024 as the operational entry point to resources and services.
Federation in build up: since March 2025, work has been underway on the first wave with 13 candidate nodes at different stages of development.
Shared operational guidance: publication of the EOSC Federation Handbook, with a second edition (January 2026) to support node onboarding and operations.
Community and capacity building: the EOSC Winter School 2026 (Nice) brought together more than 180 participants to support the 2026 rollout.
Scaling through open calls: on 3 November 2025, three open calls were launched to expand the Federation (closing 18 February 2026, with projects expected to start from May 2026).