A story of success: EOSC Regional Event in Budapest

A plethora of presentations and enlightening talks, as well as in-depth discussions among members of the regional & EOSC community, highlighted NI4OS-Europe contribution to EOSC and the fruitful outcomes of the regional and European collaboration, as well as the challenges ahead towards building, delivering and ensuring sustainability of the European Open Science Cloud.

The conference coincided with the declaration of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, promoting the principles of open access to research literature, as well as with 20 years of regional collaboration in South-East Europe, coordinated by GRNET. The conference took place on 28-29 September at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, organized by University of Debrecen. It gathered more than 120 members of NI4OS-Europe and other EOSC-related projects, National Open Science Cloud Initiatives’ representatives, researchers, scientists and policy makers. It was also live-streamed and attended remotely.

Dr. Anastas Mishev chaired the opening session of the event and invited to the floor Dr. István Szabó, Vice President of the National Research, Development and Innovation Office in Hungary, who talked about Open Science challenges and success in the country. In his keynote presentation, Dr. Ognjen Prnjat, NI4OS-Europe coordinator and Director of European Infrastructures & Projects at GRNET, presented NI4OS-Europe successful outcomes and talked about the regional collaboration in the last 20 years that has leveraged technological, research, policy and human skills developments in South East Europe, enabling innovation and inclusiveness in science. Rene Buch, Chief Technical Officer, EOSC Association presented the technical vision of the EOSC Association and highlighted the need for a rich set of skills even beyond technical implementation in order to successfully build the “EOSC machine” and ensure its uptake among research communities. Dr. Michel Schouppe, Senior expert and team leader on EOSC, Open Science Unit, DG R&I, provided insights on EOSC as part of the EC strategy for Open Science.

The representation of EOSC regional projects, namely EOSC-Nordic, EOSC Pillar and EOSC Synergy, as well as presentations on projects that enhance the EOSC capacity – DICE, EGI-ACE OpenAIRE-Nexus and C-SCALE, provided a holistic view of the Open Science ecosystem and highlighted the value of collective work performed for achieving global coverage of the Pan-European Cloud.

Amongst other detailed topics, policy aspects of EOSC, Open Research Data Management tools, NI4OS-Europe catalogue and generic services, the pre-production environment for service and repository onboarding, were presented in detail. Scientists from Life Sciences, Climate & Meteorology, Digital Cultural Heritage and Computational Physics research communities presented the results of their research projects that run using services from the NI4OS-Europe catalogue.

The event concluded with a session dedicated to the users’ experience, needs and their vision for the European Open Science Cloud, for achieving research excellence and growth.