Opening the second day of the EOSC Stakeholders Forum was European Commission Directorate-General for Research & Innovation - Open Science and Open Innovation Director Jean-David Malo who sent a message for the EOSC Stakeholders Forum that was read on his behalf by Jean-Claude Burgelman.
The director then called upon research infrastructures to be more open towards finding synergies with the EOSC. “Research infrastructures should have an open mindset. We shouldn’t be too conservative. Research infrastructures shouldn’t be afraid to lose their role. In fact, EOSC will actually facilitate their involvement further. EOSC will not disrupt but the research infrastructures should be ready to adopt new practices. It’s just natural evolution,” Jean-David said.
This year, a call topic was launched for connecting ESFRI infrastructures to the EOSC. “This led to five cluster projects for the life sciences, analytical sciences, environment and astronomy. These projects will work towards integration. It won’t be five separate platforms but they will work towards EOSC and gain visibility there,” said the director.
He said they are counting on the representatives of the EOSC board to contribute to the uptake of FAIR principles and foster cooperation between pan-European research infrastructures while also inviting ESFRI as a forum to be an active contributor.
His presentation was followed by quick presentation from various EOSC INFRA Cluster projects such as EOSC-Life for life sciences infrastructures, ENVRI-FAIR for environmental research infrastructures, ESCAPE as the astronomy and particle physics cluster, PANOSC for multidisciplinary scientific analysis services, and SSHOC for the social sciences and humanities ESFRIs. They all detailed the activities towards connecting their domains to EOSC.