SND, with University of Gothenburg as host university, will become a new member of the European research infrastructure EOSC. The decision was made in an EOSC Association board of directors meeting on 28 October, when eight other Swedish organisations were also admitted to the organisation.
EOSC – an abbreviation of European Open Science Cloud – is a large-scale research infrastructure initiative created to promote access to research data on a European level, as well as globally. The objective is to create a virtual collaboration platform that will support researchers across scientific disciplines with storage, management, analysis, and reuse of research data. EOSC is funded by the European Commission and is part of a long-term plan to strengthen Europe as a competitive data and knowledge economy.
SND has followed and contributed to the development of EOSC since the start of the initiative in 2016. SND has, for example, participated in the EOSC Bylaws working group, which was central to developing the work processes that inform the creation of the infrastructure. But the major contribution from SND has been through its membership in the regional project EOSC-Nordic, designated to facilitate and coordinate the development of EOSC in the Nordic and Baltic countries.
The importance of a Nordic perspective in the EOSC operations
University of Gothenburg, which is the host organisation of SND, has been admitted as a provisional member of the EOSC Association. This is a preliminary admission, and a final approval will be given during the EOSC General Assembly on 17 December. The membership will give SND better opportunities to influence the development of EOSC, and allows SND to take part in the General Assembly and the election of the first EOSC President and Directors.
—Now that the EOSC Association has been founded, member organisations will be able to influence the development through their work in the association, but even more so by taking a central role in various development projects. We will also have a chance to communicate a Nordic perspective on research data management, where our Swedish personal identification numbers is just one thing that gives us advantages as well as some data management challenges in Open Science, says SND Director Max Petzold.
He hopes that the SND operational and organisational model, where research data are managed and stored locally with the SND network members, will be seen as an inspiration.
—It is important that we now promote the distributed system that we’ve developed together with the Swedish higher education institutions. A system where research data remain in the HEI means that there is a clearer ownership of data, and it is suitable for research data which contain personal or sensitive information. In combination with our metadata tool and a national research data catalogue, this gives us a good advantage and opportunity to showcase and disseminate all types of data.
Alongside SND, eight other Swedish organisations were admitted as provisional members of EOSC Association: the ESS research infrastructure, Chalmers University of Technology, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm University, Umeå University, Uppsala University, Formas, and the Swedish Research Council.