The European University Association (EUA), which counts nearly 900 member organisations across 48 countries, has voiced strong support for a distinct Work Programme-based Partnership for EOSC in the next European framework programme, FP10.
In its response to the European Commission’s public consultation on the future of European Partnerships under the 2028-2034 Horizon Europe programme, EUA has called for “a more focused, accessible and coherent partnership landscape that complements open collaborative research and preserves the core mission of the framework programme”.
In its statement, EUA has singled out “the European Partnership for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) as a particularly valuable initiative at the European level. The EOSC Partnership provides a strategic advantage that cannot be achieved as effectively through fragmented national actions”.
EUA’s advocacy for a distinct Work Programme-based Partnership for EOSC in FP10 follows on the support of LIBER, the voice of Europe’s libraries; Science Europe, which represents European research funding agencies; and Germany’s largest research organisation, the Helmholtz Association. This position mirrors those of the 42 Members States and Associated Countries in the EOSC Steering Board and the approximately 250 members and observers of the EOSC Association.
From the EUA statement:
EOSC is the perfect example of what UNESCO calls an “essential research infrastructure, governed and owned by the community and funded collectively by governments, funders and institutions reflecting the diverse interests and needs of the research community and society”. This is because it:
- brings distributed nationally and community-owned resources together into an interoperable research commons while preserving ownership and autonomy;
- enables long-term, secure, and trustworthy access to high-quality findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) research data,
- strengthens reproducibility and cross-border collaboration; and
- helps to ensure that Europe can develop and control the infrastructures, data, and standards that underpin future R&I activities.
