EOSC-Nordic

A new path to European research and innovation in Nordic and Baltic countries

The vision of the European Union’s Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to give Europe a global lead in scientific data infrastructures to ensure that European scientists reap the full benefits of data-driven science. In line with this ambitious objective, the EU-funded EOSC-Nordic project will organise initiatives to support and develop open science and open innovation in Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden. Their aim is to facilitate the coordination of these initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries and exploit synergies to achieve greater harmonisation at policy and service provision across these countries. The project aims to catalyse the Nordic and Baltic uptake of the EOSC to maintain world-class research infrastructure.

The EOSC-Nordic publishes deliverables, scientific publications, and relevant outputs to ZENODO. All but administrative deliverables containing legal, financial, or ethical information are made available under the CC-BY 4.0 (Attribution 4.0 International) license. The resources are published under the disclaimer ‘Draft not yet approved by the European Commission’ at the time of formal submission.

The Knowledge Hub is a collection of all useful resources and information, incl. reusable material, overview of the Nordic available EOSC services, guide and support to the EOSC Portal, etc.

EOSC-Nordic has built a joint vision, and trust and reliability on each other as fellow colleagues across institutions and countries.

The project office (PO) focuses on the budget and continuously matching an adjusted balance according to performing and underperforming partners. The PO serves as secretariat for the Project Management Board, Executive Board, General Assembly and the International Advisory Committee, thus ensuring a good interlink between the respective consortium bodies, and to the other regional EOSC implementation projects. The Wiki, hosted by NeIC, is operated by the PO.

Highlights are two successful policy workshops gathering together approximately 200 participants (funders, policy makers and other stakeholders) to discuss open science policies, EOSC development and EOSC-Nordic's input to the related discussions. WP2 has also actively given input to open science and EOSC related discussions in the form of reports and other documents, and discussed the findings with stakeholders.

With a focus on the service providers, the present EOSC service compliance situations and the EOSC service on-boarding and integration process, a cornerstone so far is the following two results, and also the fundamentals for the next phase of a federated service interoperability set-up:
1. Design of a maturity model for assessing Research Infrastructure services for EOSC.
2. Creation of interoperability guidelines document for service providers.

The FAIR assessment of 98 data repositories in the Nordic and Baltic region has proved to be a unique undertaking. It shows that, although data repositories often claim to be FAIR, it turns out very few are. Using our assessment methodology for measuring FAIR uptake, we measure an average FAIR score to be 24%. The evolution of this FAIR uptake estimate is being tracked throughout the project. Additionally, the series of FAIRification events has turned out to be quite well attended, presenting concrete advice on how to address common issues in making data FAIR.

EOSC-Nordic demonstrates the present Nordic and EOSC compliant infrastructure solutions within different research communities across the Nordic region. Four highlights so far are:
1. Work on data management and job submission with Galaxy for climate has been noticed by EOSC-Life which are interested in the work and we have formed a ‘collaboration’ with them centered around the Galaxy portal.
2. Work on uploading metadata into B2Find, prompted a rethink of the process from B2Find developers and maintainers to make things easier to use.
3. Feedback from EOSC-Nordic, on the RDA machine-actionable DMP schema has been provided and successfully taken up.
4. The EOSC-Nordic cross-border work has provoked interest from the Noridc EuroHPC, alias Lumi consortium through the NeIC Puhuri project to understand how to facilitate cross-border computing through portals.

Raising awareness of EOSC-Nordic by creating the communication strategy, channels, and activities for different stakeholders has been a priority.
A beta version of the Knowledge Hub was established ahead of time to work on competence building and knowledge sharing among stakeholders and relevant professional environments.
The communication activities were impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, particularly in terms of in-person events, which have been replaced by online events and webinars.