EOSC Synergy: a successful project on EOSC national implementation
The EOSC Synergy project, coordinated by CSIC, is one of the INFRAEOSC 05b projects for the implementation and policy analysis of the EOSC at the national level.
The objectives of the project were focused on
- Expanding the EOSC Capacity by integrating national resources and simplifying access by implementing standards and best practices following the EOSC standardisation and open science concepts;
- Building EOSC Capabilities across multidisciplinary research areas by adapting to EOSC the architecture of discipline-specific services;
- Fostering EOSC services integration by promoting a quality-driven integration process that promotes adherence to EOSC standards, and eases the path towards the adoption of the FAIR paradigm;
- Promoting EOSC harmonisation in terms of alignment towards common policies and practices, and support to EU directives in cloud security;
- Developing the EOSC Human capital by incorporating online training as a new full-fledged component of the EOSC Portal, facilitating access to high-quality technical information and tailored training materials.
The National Clouds of the countries were integrated, and are currently serving the scientific needs in the areas of Earth observation, Environment, Biomedicine and Astrophysics. Ten thematic services in these fields were supported to be adapted to the EOSC core, increasing the size of resources available to scientists. In addition, EOSC Synergy contributed to support research to fight the COVID-19 pandemic by deploying the first EOSC-enabled Cloud Computing Service based on Galaxy genomics analysis.
An EOSC service quality baseline and a Quality Badge scheme were defined. A practical implementation is already available as a prototype for scientific applications. EOSC Synergy partners developed and made available in open source, a specialised library (JePL) that supports the deployment of the scientific use cases using quality assurance guidelines.
All the software developed by the project is open source and has a well-defined license. Training material is delivered via the EOSC training platform, with a first version available at https://learn.eosc-synergy.eu, where users can find best practices on how to create self-deployable tutorials, using advanced toolsets building on the MOOC concepts, and the provision of advanced services such as “Hackathons as a Service”.
An in-depth policy analysis regarding EOSC readiness and awareness in the countries involved in the project was carried out in cooperation with the other regional projects. EOSC-Synergy has produced 7 Landscape analysis reports of EOSC-related national policies and practices and contributed substantially to the EOSC Working Groups in which the project has been invited to participate.
