The EOSC Association has taken another step towards closer collaboration with the European health research community by joining the Stakeholder Forum of the European Partnership on One Health Antimicrobial Resistance (EUP OHAMR).
The health domain has enormous capacity for data-driven research, innovation, and scientific breakthroughs. Realising this potential, however, requires addressing particularly demanding requirements around privacy, security, interoperability, and the ethical and legal use of sensitive data. As the Common European Data Space for Research and Innovation, EOSC is well positioned to turn these challenges into opportunities for collaboration and discovery. Operational since 08 October 2026, the EOSC Federation provides a federated environment that enables research data and services to be shared and reused across disciplines and borders, while respecting the specific requirements of sensitive health data.
Building on this foundation, practical solutions to support the effective sharing of health data are already emerging across the EOSC ecosystem, from EOSC Nodes specialised on health and life sciences to multiple INFRAEOSC projects addressing specific challenges around sensitive data sharing, with active engagement with major health initiatives.
Building bridges between EOSC and the European Health Data Space
In the past years, through the work of its Health Data Task Force, the EOSC Association has sought to ensure that EOSC develops in step with the evolving European health data landscape. The Task Force is working on defining EOSC’s strategy towards the extensive use of health data in research, including identifying the specific technical, regulatory, ethical and legal requirements needed to make access to and processing of health data through EOSC FAIR and secure, while fostering interoperability with the secondary-use infrastructure of the European Health Data Space (EHDS).
In March 2026, the Task Force published its first deliverable highlighting the complementary roles of EOSC and the EHDS. Two roundtables have been organised in collaboration with the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety (DG SANTE) on 8 October 2024 and 13 May 2026 to further explore how EOSC services and infrastructure could support the deployment of EHDS.
A new connection with One Health AMR research
Participation in the EUP OHAMR Stakeholder Forum represents a natural extension of EOSC-A’s engagement with the health domain. Launched in 2025, EUP OHAMR brings together 55 organisations from across Europe and beyond to strengthen research and innovation addressing antimicrobial resistance through a One Health approach, recognising the interconnections between human, animal and plant health and the environment.
“EOSC, throughout the EOSC Federation, is creating the natural ecosystem for One Health data mobilisation at scale, providing a response to antimicrobial resistance research needs, such as federated discovery of well curated datasets, secure advanced data linkage and cross-domain integration, AAI system to securely access trusted research environments, or FAIR services to enhance traceable deposition of research outcomes and reproducibility,” states Enrique Bernal-Delgado, member of the EOSC-A Board of Directors and EOSC-A representative in the EUP OHAMR Stakeholder Forum.
At the same time, closer interaction with the EUP OHAMR community provides EOSC-A with a valuable platform to strengthen collaboration with key stakeholders across the research, policy, healthcare, and environmental sectors, which enables EOSC to better align its priorities with emerging scientific and policy needs and strengthen its role as a trusted partner supporting data-intensive health research across Europe.
By connecting horizontal research data infrastructure with domain-specific communities, EOSC can help create the conditions for health data to be discovered, accessed and analysed for research in a secure, interoperable and trustworthy way, while respecting the regulatory and ethical requirements that make health data a uniquely sensitive research resource. A concrete example is the federated analysis of pathogen genomes, involving the Slovak and Polish EOSC Nodes. By bringing computation to sensitive data rather than transferring datasets across borders, this initiative aims to support faster outbreak detection and antimicrobial resistance (AMR) surveillance while safeguarding data sovereignty. It illustrates how EOSC can facilitate cross-border health research and help address shared challenges such as AMR through secure, federated data sharing.
