December 18, 2020

Two years after the official launch of the European Open Science Cloud initiative, the European Open Science Cloud Association (EOSC Association) was established in July 2020. The founding assembly, which brought together over 200 participants, was held on December 17, 2020.

At the General Assembly, 142 members were officially admitted to full membership and 49 members were admitted as observers. Of the latter, 21 members represent mandate organizations. Among the full members is SRCE, as a mandate organization of the Republic of Croatia, with the role of coordinating national initiative for open science and building the National Open Science Cloud (NOSC) appointed by the Ministry of Science and Education of the Republic of Croatia.  SRCE is also the coordinator of the project Croatian scientific and educational cloud (HR-ZOO). The overall outcome of the HR-ZOO project is an established and operational national e-infrastructure for educational and scientific purposes which will allow coherent and efficient participation in European level e-infrastructure initiatives and in particular contribute to the European Open Science Cloud development.

During the event, elections were held for members of the EOSC Executive Board. Karel Luyben (CESAER) was elected President of the Executive Board and Marialuisa Lavitrano (UNIMIB), Suzanne Dumouchel (CNRS), Klaus Tochtermann (ZBW), Sarah Jones (GÉANT), Ignacio Blanquer (UPV), Wilhelm Widmark (SU), Bob Jones (CERN) and Ronan Byrne (HEAnet) were elected members. The newly elected EOSC Executive Board will begin its work on January 1, 2021.

A draft of the EOSC Partnership (PDF, 3.080 KB) under the new EU Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Program was adopted as well as the Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda SRIA v0.9 (PDF, 3.785 KB), which provides general guidelines for the adoption of work programs for EOSC in Horizon Europe.

The establishment of the EOSC organization is a necessary step in the implementation of the EOSC partnership and an important milestone in the implementation of open science in Europe.

The European Open Science Cloud is an initiative of the European Commission that supports the development of open science and innovation by developing research infrastructures and pooling services. This provides European scientists with the opportunity to take full advantage of data-based science, offering a virtual environment with free and open data storage, management, analysis and re-use services in all scientific fields.

The vision of EOSC was presented in 2015, and was officially launched in November 2018 with access to the initial services of the EOSC portal. Supporting the EU's open science policy and the European Data Strategy, EOSC represents one of the most significant steps in the development of European science. With it, the European Commission promotes processes that foster open, publicly available and usable scientific achievements aimed at ensuring that the science it funds is geared towards the development of society in order to respond to the societal challenges facing Europe.

For more information, please visit the EOSC website and the EOSC Secretariat website.