New year, new beginnings!
There are seven ambitious EOSC-related Horizon Europe projects kicking off their three-year journey in 2024, aiming to contribute to EOSC implementation and development as Horizon Research and Innovation Actions. All these projects are funded through HORIZON.1.3 – Research Infrastructures, under Consolidating and Developing the Landscape of European Research Infrastructures.
The projects concentrate on the following topics:
- Building on the science cluster approach to ensure the uptake of EOSC by research infrastructures and research communities (OSCARS)
- Planning, tracking, and assessing scientific knowledge production (OSTrails)
- Development of community-based approaches for ensuring and improving the quality of scientific software and code (EVERSE)
- Next generation services for operational and sustainable EOSC Core Infrastructure (EOSC Beyond)
- Trusted environments for sensitive data management in EOSC (SIESTA, TITAN, EOSC ENTRUST)
Details of the new projects
OSCARS – Open Science Clusters’ Action for Research and Society
Starting date 1 January 2024, coordinated by CNRS with a total budget of 25M.
The OSCARS project brings together ESFRI and the research infrastructures organised in five EOSC Science Clusters. These are ENVRI-FAIR (environmental science), EOSC-Life (life science), ESCAPE (astronomy and particle physics), PaNOSC (neutron and light source science) and SSHOC (social science and humanities). The OSCARS project aims to combine individual cluster-based key activities and new shared strategic pathways towards consolidating the achievements from these projects into permanent interdisciplinary services and working practices as well as leading and fostering the involvement of research communities in EOSC through development of new open science projects. Together they will drive the uptake of FAIR-data-intensive research throughout the European Research Area (ERA).
SIESTA – Secure Interactive Environments for SensiTive data Analytics
Starting date 1 January 2024, coordinated by CSIC, with a total budget of 5M.
The SIESTA project aims to provide a set of tools, services, and methodologies for the effective sharing of sensitive data in the EOSC, following a cloud-based model and approach. SIESTA will provide user-friendly tools with the aim of fostering the uptake of sensitive data sharing and processing in the EOSC. The project will deliver trusted cloud-based environments for the management and sharing of sensitive data that are built in a reproducible way, together with a set of services and tools to ease the secure sharing of sensitive data in the EOSC through state-of-the-art anonymization techniques. The overall objective is to enhance the EOSC Exchange services by delivering a set of cloud-based trusted environments for the analysis of sensitive data in the EOSC demonstrating the feasibility of the FAIR principles over them.
OSTrails – Open Science Plan-Track-Assess Pathways
Starting date 1 February 2024, coordinated by OpenAIRE with a total budget of 7M.
OSTrails aims to advance processes and instruments for Planning, Tracking, and Assessing scientific knowledge production beyond state-of-the art, working with various national and thematic contexts, improving existing infrastructure, and connecting key components. By increasing the efficacy of Data Management Plans and turning them from static narratives to living, it aims to interconnect “machine actionable” resources. For the Track stage, OSTrails is set to establish an open, interoperable and high-quality ecosystem of Scientific Knowledge Graphs, enriching them to become evidence of communities’ FAIR implementations. For the Assess stage, OSTrails aims to deliver modular and expandable FAIR tests, towards “machine actionable” metrics, complemented by user guidance.
EVERSE – European Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence
Starting on 1 March 2024, coordinated by Centre for Research & Technology Hellas (CERTH) with a total budget of 7M.
The EVERSE project aims to create a framework for research software and code excellence. These are collaboratively designed and championed by the research communities across five EOSC Science Clusters and national Research Software Expertise Centres. They are in pursuit of building a European network of Research Software Quality and setting the foundations of a future Virtual Institute for Research Software Excellence.
TITAN – Trusted envIronments for confidenTiAl computiNg and secure data sharing
Starting date 1 February 2024, coordinated by University of Murcia with a total budget of 5M.
The TITAN project will enrich the EOSC Interoperability Framework with a software platform solution for confidential data collaboration. It aims to further develop secure and privacy-preserving data processing. The platform will enable access to sensitive data sets from public entities and government agencies and will be compatible by design with the EOSC Interoperability Framework on the technical, semantic, organisational and legal layers. To promote community adoption of TITAN’s open-source software artefacts, the solution will be practically demonstrated in several vertical cross-border scenarios – notably in the public administration and healthcare sector.
EOSC ENTRUST – A European Network of TRUSTed research environments
Starting date 1 March 2024, coordinated by ELIXIR/ European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) with a total budget of 4M.
The objective of the EOSC ENTRUST project is to create a European network of trusted research environments for sensitive data and to drive European interoperability by joint development of a common blueprint for federated data access and analysis. This blueprint for interoperability is anchored in the EOSC Interoperability Framework spanning the four dimensions of Legal, Organisational, Technical and Semantic interoperability. EOSC-ENTRUST has identified four driver projects covering Genomics, Clinical trials, Social science, and public-private partnerships to benchmark capabilities, inform blueprint design and demonstrate secure data analysis using federated workflows.
EOSC Beyond – Advancing Innovation and Collaboration for Research
Starting on 1 April 2024, coordinated by EGI with a total budget of 10M.
The overall objective of the EOSC Beyond project is to advance Open Science and innovation in research in the context of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by providing new EOSC Core capabilities allowing scientific applications to find, compose and access multiple Open Science resources and offer them as integrated capabilities to researchers. The project aims to accelerate new scientific applications with software adapters and to enable Open Science with machine composability and dynamic deployment of shared resources. The project is to support innovation in EOSC with a testing and integration environment, as well as to align the EOSC Core architecture and specifications to integrate with European dataspaces.
