This section of the consultation is not strictly relevant to the question of a future EOSC Partnership, but does reflect on some aspects of EOSC’s policy agenda. We have therefore made suggestion for how to answer these questions in a manner that may help to advance that agenda.

The full text of Section 1, including the suggested multiple-choice selections, is provided in the Annex to the EOSC-A briefing document:

If you would prefer to move quickly through the section without addressing these questions, the final option in each list of choices is “Cannot say”.

The proposed EOSC-A responses to Questions 1-4 are intended for direct use in the questionnaire. Questions 2.1, 3.1, and 4.1 have been deemed NOT APPLICABLE.

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Proposed text from EOSC-A:

Active engagement of Member States and Associated Countries should be a fundamental consideration in the portfolio-building process. European Partnerships are most effective when they provide a framework through which European and national priorities, investments, and capabilities can be aligned around shared objectives, while recognising different levels of readiness and capacity across countries.

The resulting portfolio should therefore incentivise broad and meaningful participation of Member States and Associated Countries, including through transparent and flexible modalities for financial and in-kind contributions. This is essential to strengthen European ownership, avoid uneven participation and ensure that partnerships create durable structuring effects beyond individual EU-funded projects. It also enables national investments and infrastructures to contribute to, and benefit from, common European capabilities.

For cross-cutting initiatives such as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), this engagement is particularly important. The EOSC Federation is inherently distributed, bringing together national, thematic, and e-infrastructure resources while preserving their ownership and autonomy. Sustained participation by Member States and Associated Countries is therefore indispensable to building a resilient, inclusive, and genuinely European research data ecosystem, and to ensuring that researchers across Europe can contribute to and benefit from shared FAIR data, services ,and infrastructures.

The portfolio should therefore preserve EOSC’s distinct horizontal role, with balanced tripartite governance involving the European Commission, participating states, and the research community represented by the EOSC Association. This will maximise the return on previous public investments and ensure that sectoral partnerships can build on a coherent European research data foundation rather than creating parallel and fragmented solutions.

References: 

• Council Recommendation of 24 June 2025 on the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2025-2027 — Priority Area 1: Deepening a truly functioning internal market for knowledge
• European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures (EU)
• AI Continent Action Plan (EU)
• European Strategy for AI in Science (EU)
• Apply AI Strategy (EU)
• Data Union Strategy (EU)
• Much more than a market (Enrico Letta et al.)
• Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, technology and innovation to boost European competitiveness (Heitor et al.)
• The future of European competitiveness: Report by Mario Draghi (EU)

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Proposed text from EOSC-A:

A thematic for which intervention through a European Partnership is essential is support for research excellence on a European rather than national scale. Europe’s ability to remain globally competitive increasingly depends on enabling researchers to work seamlessly across borders, disciplines, and infrastructures, and to access and combine the knowledge, data, tools, and services required for excellent science irrespective of where these resources are located.

A core element of this thematic is the development of a trusted, secure, and sovereign European research data ecosystem, including FAIR research data and services, Open Science, interoperability, and the data foundations required for AI-enabled science. European-level intervention provides a demonstrable strategic advantage that cannot be achieved as effectively through fragmented national or purely project-based actions. This should be implemented through a distinct Work Programme-based European Partnership for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

Europe has already established a strong position through sustained European and national investment in research infrastructures, repositories, services, and the EOSC Federation. The next Framework Programme should consolidate this position by moving EOSC from a developing initiative to a durable, production-grade European capability. The EOSC Federation brings distributed nationally and community-owned resources together into an interoperable research commons while preserving ownership and autonomy. It enables long-term, secure, and trustworthy access to high-quality FAIR research data, strengthens reproducibility and cross-border collaboration, and operationalises the Common European Data Space for Research and Innovation.

This capability is also indispensable to Europe’s competitiveness and strategic autonomy. By supplying large, diverse, and machine-actionable FAIR datasets, with provenance, interoperability, and trusted access conditions, EOSC provides the research data backbone for responsible AI in science. It complements EuroHPC, RAISE, Research Infrastructures, and other Common European Data Spaces, while supporting the free circulation of knowledge across Europe. Consolidating EOSC through a distinct Partnership will protect past investments, avoid fragmentation, and strengthen Europe’s capacity to deliver research excellence at European scale and to shape international practices around FAIR data, interoperability, trust, and Open Science.

References: 

• Council Recommendation of 24 June 2025 on the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2025-2027 — Priority Area 1: Deepening a truly functioning internal market for knowledge
• European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures (EU)
• AI Continent Action Plan (EU)
• European Strategy for AI in Science (EU)
• Apply AI Strategy (EU)
• Data Union Strategy (EU)
• Much more than a market (Enrico Letta et al.)
• Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, technology and innovation to boost European competitiveness (Heitor et al.)
• The future of European competitiveness: Report by Mario Draghi (EU)

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Proposed text from EOSC-A:

A thematic where European Partnership intervention is essential to strengthen Europe’s position is the trusted data foundation for artificial intelligence and data-intensive science. Europe faces a growing innovation gap in AI, including limited access to high-quality, trustworthy, and reusable data at the scale needed for advanced research. At the same time, geopolitical and commercial dependencies on non-European platforms create vulnerabilities for access to critical research data and services.

A distinct Work Programme-based European Partnership for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) would directly address these weaknesses by pooling fragmented national capacities, creating critical mass, coordinating investments, and establishing common standards and governance frameworks. This is particularly important where Europe risks becoming dependent on infrastructures, technologies or standards developed elsewhere. By federating European research data, services, and infrastructures through the EOSC Federation, and making high-quality FAIR resources discoverable, accessible, and machine-actionable, EOSC reduces data scarcity and gives researchers a trusted environment in which to develop and use AI-enabled methods. Provenance, interoperability and reproducibility are embedded into the EOSC approach, helping to mitigate black-box risks and enabling responsible and scientifically credible AI outputs.

For research data and digital infrastructures in particular, the objective should not simply be to catch up technologically, but to ensure that Europe can develop and control the infrastructures, data, and standards that underpin future research and innovation. 

EOSC should operate in close coordination with EuroHPC and RAISE so that Europe’s investments in data, compute and AI function as a coherent capability. EOSC provides the AI-enhanced research data and services layer; EuroHPC provides high-performance and quantum computing; and RAISE supports AI-focused capabilities and uptake. Strengthening these links, while preserving EOSC’s distinct governance and budgetary autonomy, will reinforce European strategic autonomy, improve the scientific usability of Europe’s digital investments, and enable Europe to play a stronger role in shaping global norms for interoperability, data governance, trustworthy AI and responsible research.

References: 

• Council Recommendation of 24 June 2025 on the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2025-2027 — Priority Area 1: Deepening a truly functioning internal market for knowledge
• European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures (EU)
• AI Continent Action Plan (EU)
• European Strategy for AI in Science (EU)
• Apply AI Strategy (EU)
• Data Union Strategy (EU)
• Much more than a market (Enrico Letta et al.)
• Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, technology and innovation to boost European competitiveness (Heitor et al.)
• The future of European competitiveness: Report by Mario Draghi (EU)

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Proposed text from EOSC-A:

A thematic for which European Partnership intervention is essential to address major societal, environmental, and systemic challenges is the cross-border and cross-disciplinary sharing and reuse of trusted research data, software, workflows, and services. Challenges such as climate change, health, an ageing society, and rising inequality cannot be addressed effectively across fragmented disciplinary, institutional, or national infrastructures. They require political and technical coordination in order to access diverse data and research resources and combine them across domains and borders at European scale.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) provides the horizontal infrastructure needed for this coordination. Through the EOSC Federation, national, thematic, and e-infrastructure resources can be connected into a distributed but coherent environment in which researchers can discover, access, and reuse FAIR resources under trusted conditions. This strengthens interdisciplinary collaboration, reduces duplication of infrastructure and effort, and allows previous public investments, in particular at the national level, to grow into interoperable capabilities that can be used across Europe.

A distinct Work Programme-based European Partnership for EOSC is essential to achieve the necessary long-term structuring effect. It provides a shared European implementation framework for interoperability, security, trust, FAIR data, and Open Science while enabling Member States and research communities to contribute according to their capacities. EOSC also acts as the cross-cutting Common European Data Space for Research and Innovation, connecting research outputs with other Common European Data Spaces and supporting the EU Single Market for knowledge. Fragmented national approaches alone cannot deliver this level of cross-border interoperability, resilience, scale, and sustained coordination.

References: 

• Council Recommendation of 24 June 2025 on the European Research Area Policy Agenda 2025-2027 — Priority Area 1: Deepening a truly functioning internal market for knowledge
• European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures (EU)
• AI Continent Action Plan (EU)
• European Strategy for AI in Science (EU)
• Apply AI Strategy (EU)
• Data Union Strategy (EU)
• Much more than a market (Enrico Letta et al.)
• Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, technology and innovation to boost European competitiveness (Heitor et al.)
• The future of European competitiveness: Report by Mario Draghi (EU)

If applicable, please indicate your participation in the current European Open Science Cloud Partnership by selecting it in the list of partnerships at the bottom of the page. 

All EOSC-A Members and Observers are considered as participating in the EOSC Partnership as a “partnership member”.