EOSC-Pillar Final Report

In this final Annual Report of the project, we will review the results that have been presented at our EOSC-Pillar Final Conference: Building an EOSC from National Contributions, held on 25-27 October 2022 in Paris. With the end of the EOSC-Pillar project and as we look back, we should be proud of our achievements. I thank all the partners which have been contributing to these results these past few years.

Together, we have brought forward several achievements such as technical ones - the Federated FAIR Data Space, the use cases, and the training platform. We also have policy achievements, which I think we should also invest in further in the future. This includes the national initiatives that have been consolidated in the project and have been federated in a common effort to bring the results of national activities to the European landscape. We did very much together in this respect, such as surveys and the legal policy analysis. In addition, the guidelines and recommendations developed in the project are very relevant and will be useful for other European projects succeeding EOSC-Pillar. All in all, we should be proud that we have built a federation of initiatives and developed transnational access.

The idea of building this project came to us because we were convinced that the work that was going on at a national level had to be harmonised in a common effort to federate all the activities in the European landscape. Overall, I think that this regional approach has been successful and in the near future, we should invest in similar national initiatives.

The end of EOSC-Pillar is not the end of the activities of course. We have a legacy which will be useful for other projects. Just as an example, in the Horizon Europe project Skills4EOSC, while concentrated in training and similar activities, the approach of federated national activities is the same as what we have done in EOSC-Pillar. We are proud that the activity and ideas developed in EOSC-Pillar will also be used in the next set of projects that will put forward new ideas and initiatives to realise what we think is the EOSC infrastructure that we need to set up at the European level.

With our experience in EOSC-Pillar, we can see that setting up a European infrastructure should be linked to national activities - this is the most important lesson that we learned in our project.