EOSC-synergy – Expanding Capabilities, Building Capacities

The proposal for the EOSC-synergy project, submitted to the Horizon 2020 EINFRA-EOSC-5(b) call, has been favourably evaluated. The project will be coordinated by IBERGRID, the Iberian scientific and technological cooperation framework signed by Spain and Portugal on distributed computing. The consortium additionally includes the main research infrastructure and data providers in Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, experts in policy development and FAIR data repositories in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and the EGI Foundation. Research groups in the areas of Life Sciences, Environmental Sciences and Astrophysics. Earth Observation are represented by research centers from Portugal, France and Spain, and by a leading industrial partner, INDRA. The project will also act as a bridge of EOSC towards South America, establishing a  link with the Brazilian Cloud and Astrophysics experiments. EOSC-synergy will contribute to the European Open Science Cloud landscape by expanding the capabilities and building the capabilities of EOSC. In practice this will mean more compute and storage available to researchers, and more datasets and tools to expand avenues of research. In the upcoming 3 years, EOSC-synergy will be the H2020 instrument to promote the implementation and adoption of EOSC services by scientific users in the countries involved in the consortium. The ultimate goal is to build EOSC as a coordinated effort, as an open environment for scientific data and related processing that promotes convergence of infrastructures and scientific thematic services provided at national or European level. Isabel Campos, EOSC-synergy project coordinator and CSIC researcher at the Institute of Physics of Cantabria (IFCA) in Santander, says: “EOSC-synergy understands the EOSC challenge as an opportunity to remove the obstacles that currently prevent an effective sharing and reuse of scientific data, enabling exploitation of the full data potential and harnessing the capacity of regional investments. In doing so, we will help bridging the “digital gap” between EC countries with different readiness levels”. Jorge Gomes, EOSC-synergy project deputy coordinator and researcher at the Laboratory of Instrumentation and Particles (LIP) in Lisbon, adds: “A fundamental goal of EOSC-synergy is the  support to the development of professional capabilities related to EOSC. Therefore, one of the project activities is providing an online training platform in the EOSC Portal to facilitate access to high quality training materials, supporting massive open online courses and self-learning capabilities”.   About the EOSC and the INFRAEOSC-05(b) call: As part of the Digital Agenda, in October 2017 the European Commission made public the EOSC Declaration, inviting Member States, Scientific Communities and Industry to participate in the construction of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The EOSC is thus the instrument of Europe to support the paradigm of Open Science. In this context the European Commission launched the INFRAEOSC-05(b) call aimed at providing the support to integrate EOSC-relevant national initiatives across Europe. The results of the call were announced on 21 February and EOSC-synergy will be one out of four projects funded under INFRAEOSC-05(b)