Today marks the public release of the first edition of the EOSC Federation Handbook. The Handbook provides an overview of the organisational and operational structure, and technical characteristics, of the EOSC Federation. It aims to serve as a practical guide for organisations that are interested in making their resources available within and across the EOSC Federation of nodes.
The EOSC Association has led the community-wide co-creation of the Handbook on behalf of the EOSC Tripartite Governance, whose decisions govern its content. As the reference document for the EOSC Federation, the Handbook will help to guide the enrolment process of the first wave of EOSC Candidate Nodes and serves as a starting point for the Federation’s build-up phase.
A living document
The first edition draft was shared with the participants in the 17-18 March 2025 Workshop for the kick-off of the EOSC Federation build-up phase. This group of Candidates will lean heavily on the guidance provided in the Handbook and, in turn, contribute to reviewing and revising it.
The experiences of the Candidate EOSC Nodes during the first wave of the Federation’s build-up phase will be incorporated directly into an updated version of the Handbook to be developed in fall 2025.
A community effort
Led by EOSC-A, the EOSC Federation Handbook has been written collaboratively through weekly meetups and monthly review meetings facilitated by the editorial team of Andy Götz and Bob Jones of EOSC-A, and Miguel Rey Mazón (TU Graz) and Mark Dietrich (EGI Foundation) working in the context of EOSC Focus. Additionally, a host of volunteer writers and reviewers from across the EOSC community made contributions to the Handbook’s development.
A community consultation was held on the first three chapters in November 2024, and a full draft incorporating the consultation feedback was submitted to the EOSC Tripartite Governance in December 2024. This draft was also distributed to the participants in the EOSC Winter School on 20 January 2025. The Handbook writing team then consolidated the feedback from both the EOSC Tripartite Governance and the EOSC EU Node in order to converge on the Handbook’s first edition.
The EOSC Federation Handbook is published in the EOSC-A community on Zenodo and is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) licence. The Handbook was entirely created by humans, without any assistance from AI.
