EGI Federation Members strengthen presence in EOSC with new Node selections

The EGI Federation continues to reinforce its role within the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), as EGI has been selected as an EOSC Node in the second wave of applications. This milestone marks an important step towards expanding the Federation’s contribution to a federated, interoperable European research infrastructure.

Moreover, several Federation members have also been appointed as EOSC Nodes in this second wave. These include Croatia (with SRCE), the Czech Republic (with CESNET), Slovenia (with ARNES), and Türkiye (with TÜBİTAK), further reinforcing the federation's geographic and organisational diversity within EOSC.

These newly appointed nodes complement the participation of EGI Federation members already selected in the first wave, such as CERN, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland. Together, these nodes represent a growing and coordinated contribution to EOSC, bringing together diverse expertise, services, and infrastructures under a common framework.

ACONET Association has been granted an EOSC Gravity Preparatory Grant to develop Austria’s formal application to become a national EOSC Node. ACONET Association and the EOSC Support Office Austria will lead the coordinated national effort to establish the governance, organisational and technical foundations required for Austria’s participation in the EOSC Federation.

The project will have six deliverables: a Project Charter covering governance, mandate, scope, services, sustainability, and federation integration; the designation of the five mandatory Node roles defined in the EOSC Federation Handbook v2.0; an implementation roadmap; a national stakeholder alignment and engagement plan; a comprehensive risk, gap, and readiness assessment with mitigation strategies; and a technical preparation plan addressing interoperability, service onboarding, monitoring, and compliance requirements.

The EOSC Node Croatia drives the integration and further development of the services that SRCE, Croatia's national e-infrastructure provider, develops and operates in close cooperation with key national stakeholders supporting Open Science. Through the Node, a broad range of national research outputs will become part of the EOSC Federation. These include outputs stored in the national repository infrastructure (DABAR), the Croatian portal of scientific and professional journals (HRČAK), and the national open-source platform (OpenCode.HR). The Node also provides services for storing, processing, and sharing research data, complemented by training and educational resources on Open Science, research data management, and research software management for researchers and data stewards. We see the EOSC Node Croatia as another important step towards deeper integration and coordination between national and European research ecosystems, enabled by the delivery of seamless services and access to rich research data for the research community.

As an active member of the EGI Federation, SRCE already contributes to and benefits from EGI services. We look forward to further strengthening our collaboration with the EGI EOSC Node by building on our long-standing partnership in the development and provision of services such as Service Monitoring, which is currently provided to both the EGI Federation and the EOSC EU Node.

The Czech EOSC Node, operated by e-INFRA CZ, contributes to the EOSC Federation by providing Czech national e-infrastructure and services, thus providing researchers with access to advanced computational resources, secure sensitive data environments, and research data repositories. 

Its advanced capabilities include LLM-as-a-Service, Galaxy, Kubernetes, Jupyter, SensitiveCloud and federated file sync and share, while providing an onboarding framework for national repositories and strategic multi-node use cases with other EOSC Nodes. 

The Czech research ecosystem will be connected to the EOSC Federation through federated AAI built on the Perun platform. The Node’s specialised services help support FAIR data practices across the EOSC Federation.

The Slovenian EOSC Node integrates mature national research infrastructures and services into the EOSC Federation, providing a sustainable and operational bridge between European Open Science policies and national implementations.

Coordinated by ARNES, anchored in permanent national institutions, and aligned with Slovenia’s Action Plan for Open Science (2023–2030), the Node brings together established national e-infrastructure, repositories, federated AAI services, high-performance computing (HPC), and scalable storage systems, collaborative platforms, data-intensive storage, containerised environments, reproducible workflows and training.

Through national and cross-border use cases, including cooperation with the Slovak, Polish, Croatian, and Latvian Nodes, the Slovenian EOSC Node will contribute transferable integration patterns, documented governance models, and reusable workflow templates to the EOSC Federation. 

Run by TUBITAK ULAKBIM, the EOSC Node Türkiye expands EOSC with national open archives, large-scale indexing, cloud computing and HPC capacity, enabling international collaboration and scalable data validation workflows, increasing the visibility of Turkish research outputs, and strengthening collaboration between Turkish and European research communities. The Node will integrate Türkiye's Open Archive Aperta and Nationwide Open Archive Indexer Harman as national data sources, align with required EOSC Federation technical capabilities, with which it has been collaborating with the EOSC AAI Working Group for some years, and contribute compute capacity to cross-node scientific workflows. Türkiye will also be under the EGI node while operating its independent National EOSC Node.

PATH2EOSCUK is the preparatory project, funded with an EOSC Gravity Preparatory Grant and led by JISC, to lay the groundwork for a future UK EOSC Node application. While the UK features a strong, federated research infrastructure and a long history of open science, more work is needed to help the domestic research community understand the practical benefits of EOSC. The project has two main objectives: 1. Compare existing UK digital infrastructure against EOSC Federation requirements to outline concrete pathways for developing a UK Node. 2. Community Engagement to raise EOSC awareness, encourage participation from UK Research Performing Organisations, and gather direct input for the infrastructure mapping.

Ukraine has been granted an EOSC Gravity Preparatory Grant to develop a thematic EOSC candidate node of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NASU) in materials science. 

MATSCI-NASU is a preparatory project to develop the governance, technical readiness, operational framework and community engagement package required for a future node application.  Its sustainability is managed through a clear division of responsibilities among partner organisations: Bogolyubov Institute for Theoretical Physics handles computational and operational readiness, Francevich Institute for Problems of Material Science oversees domain pipeline specifications and the computational workflow and its artefacts, and Kyiv Academic University manages training and community guidance. These efforts are directly supported by the NASU’s broader strategic goal to establish a permanent EOSC node and scale this framework into new thematic areas. To support integration of national services, such as Repository DataverseUA, with EOSC, these will be onboarded in the EGI EOSC Node. 

By contributing both at the federation level and through its national members, EGI plays a key role in shaping the EOSC Federation. The increasing number of EGI-affiliated Nodes reinforces the alignment between EGI’s long-standing mission and EOSC’s vision of seamless access to data, services, and resources for researchers across borders.

This collective presence not only solidifies the EOSC Federation but also highlights the value of collaboration and coordination in building a sustainable and inclusive European research infrastructure.

Stay tuned for further updates as EGI and its partners continue to contribute to the development and implementation of the EOSC Federation.