January 2023 marks the start of a year full of opportunities to expand the reach of the EOSC Partnership. CRAFT-OA, GraspOS, RDA Tiger and SciLake are the Horizon Europe INFRAEOSC projects that will kick off this month, while AquaINFRA and Blue-Cloud 2026 will get underway in February. Each of the six projects has a different but complementary focus that will contribute to the development of EOSC over the next three years.
AquaINFRA’s overall objective is to develop a virtual environment equipped with FAIR multi-disciplinary data and services to support marine and freshwater scientists and stakeholders restore healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters. The AquaINFRA virtual environment will enable the target stakeholders to store, share, access, analyse and process research data and other research digital objects from their own discipline, across research infrastructures, disciplines and national borders, leveraging on EOSC and other existing dataspaces. A specific goal of AquaINFRA is to develop an EOSC-based research infrastructure that combines marine and freshwater domains. This will include a cross-domain and -country search and discovery mechanism, and services for spatio-temporal analysis and modelling through Virtual Research Environments. This will contribute to the utilisation of EOSC as the overarching research infrastructure that enables collaboration across the domains of marine and freshwater for scientists and other stakeholders.
The project, coordinated by the Aalborg University in Denmark, consists of seventeen participants from nine countries and will run from the 1st of January until the 31st of December 2026.
Blue-Cloud 2026 follows the pilot Blue-Cloud project (www.blue-cloud.org) that combined the interests of the EOSC and the “blue research” (i.e. ocean and marine science) communities to provide simplified access to multi-disciplinary datasets from observations, analytical services, and computing facilities essential for blue science by developing a collaborative web-based environment that supports the EU Mission Ocean.
Blue-Cloud 2026 will build on the European federation of marine and inland water data management infrastructures and services built by Blue-Cloud, to evolve it into a Federated European Ecosystem able to deliver FAIR, Open and high-quality data and analytical services that are instrumental for deepening the knowledge of oceans, EU seas, coastal & inland waters. The project will become de facto a thematic marine extension of EOSC to serve the needs of the EU Blue Economy, Marine Environment and Marine Knowledge agendas. To accomplish this, Blue-Cloud 2026 will involve more sea-related data stakeholders and increase the interaction with EOSC so that it can support the EU Green Deal, UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, EU Destination Earth, and the EU Mission Starfish on healthy oceans, seas, coastal and inland waters.
Blue-Cloud 2026 is coordinated by Trust-IT, CNR & MARIS, and involves a solid, multidisciplinary, committed team of 40 partners from 13 EU countries, with VLIZ, Ifremer, MOI, Seascape Belgium as main core partners. The project started on 1st of January 2023, a face-to-face kick-off meeting is planned for February 2023.
The CRAFT-OA project aims to consolidate the Diamond Open Access publishing landscape, in which authors can publish free of charge as the universities, research institutions or libraries provide the necessary technological infrastructure. CRAFT-OA will improve the technical and organisational infrastructure of Diamond OA by (1) providing technical improvements for journal platforms and software, (2) building communities of practice to foster overall infrastructure improvement, (3) increasing visibility, discoverability and recognition for Diamond OA publishing and (4) integrating Diamond OA publishing with EOSC and other large-scale data aggregators.
CRAFT-OA is coordinated by the University of Göttingen (Germany), with 23 partners from 14 European countries representing various areas of institutional publishing. Within 36 months, starting from the 1st of January 2023, CRAFT-OA will deliver technical and community tools, training events, training materials, information, and services for the Diamond OA institutional publishing environment, to sustain and develop capacities in the field.
The GraspOS project kicks off on 19-20 January 2023 and runs until the 31 December 2025. The projects aims to build and operate a data infrastructure to support the policy reforms that need to be put in place so that a responsible research assessment system that embeds Open Science practices can be adopted in Europe. The main focus of the project is to extend the EOSC ecosystem with tools and services that facilitate the monitoring of the use and uptake of Open Science research services and outputs (publications, datasets, software). These tools and services will build upon multiple sources of metric data (e.g. OpenCitations, Scholexplorer), including capabilities offered by the EOSC Core, and will take into consideration both contemporary guidelines for Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) and the suggestions from relevant stakeholders. Improved monitoring is expected to catalyse the implementation of policy-level rewards to foster Open Science practices. GraspOS will also incorporate piloting activities to co-design, showcase, validate, and evaluate its key results considering domain-specific aspects and different levels (individual/group, institution, and national) of Open Science-aware RRA.
GraspOS is coordinated by the Athena Research Centre for Research & Innovation Information Technologies in Greece, with 17 partners from 10 countries. The project runs from the 1st of January 2023 until 31 December 2025.
The RDA TIGER project aims to facilitate and support working groups established between key European and international initiatives that pursue the global alignment, harmonisation, and standardisation of Open Science developments and technologies. RDA Tiger will directly contribute to the EOSC Partnership by supporting the alignment of policies, technologies, methodologies, practices and other outputs of European Open Science initiatives—including EOSC-related projects. To achieve this, RDA Tiger will develop a service platform for the working groups and identify which key partners need to be involved. This is expected to increase the efficiency of the working groups and ultimately help maximise the impact their results have on EOSC, global Open Science, and more generally on society.
RDA TIGER leverages the demonstrably effective instrument of community-driven RDA Working Groups and the foundations of EOSC, RDA, CODATA, Research Software Alliance (ReSA), and the Open Science movement in general, and provides a way to efficiently use the RDA platform for internationalisation and standardisation of research outputs that allow science to be reproducible and scrutinised.
RDA Tiger is being coordinated by the Research Data Alliance Association and will run from the 1st of January 2023 until 31 December 2025.
The SciLake project (Democratising and making sense out of heterogeneous scholarly content) will kick off on 23-24 January 2023 in Athens and run until 2026. Its mission is to build upon the OpenAIRE ecosystem and EOSC services to facilitate and empower the creation. Moreover, it aims at contributing to the democratisation of scholarly content and the related added value services implementing a community-driven management approach, and offer advanced, AI-assisted services that exploit customised perspectives of scientific merit to assist the navigation of the vast scientific knowledge space. In brief, SciLake will develop, support, and offer customisable services to the research community following a two-tier service architecture.
