Greetings to the EOSC-Nordic Team from the European Commission

Towards the end of 2020, European Commission made a change regarding EOSC-Nordic Officers. Pilar Ocon-Garces made a career step within the EC, which led to a welcome back to Pilar’s replacement, Christian Cuciniello. Christian knows EOSC-Nordic very well and has been with us from the very beginning, and continued to follow the project’s development in parallel with Pilar. We are privileged to have Christian back in this position and look forward to proceeding with our already well established and beneficial collaboration with the European Commission.

Please receive Christian’s words, looking back at 2020 and his special greeting to the EOSC-Nordic team and collaborators for 2021 below.

“In the last year, we have seen significant steps forward in the EOSC Governance that brought us to have a candidate European Co-Programmed Partnership as the means of steering the development and coordinating the national, institutional, and European contribution to the European Open Science Cloud. Also, in terms of implementation, the EOSC Executive Board, with its working groups, has better defined the technical and organizational structure that is being consolidated around the different EOSC related H2020 projects. EOSC-Nordic is among those projects playing a pivotal role in preparation and harmonisation in the Baltic Countries. Working in the EOSC environment has not been easy, especially because the INFRAEOS-05 projects started when the EOSC Executive Board had not yet defined the implementation pathway. EOSC-Nordic has shown flexibility and adaptation spirit.

So far, the EOSC-Nordic project has demonstrated to be well integrated with the EOSC implementation process. The effort of providing a knowledge base and support services for the communities with the on-going implementation of the Knowledge Hub, the work being done on the interoperability framework, and the implementation of the FAIR data principles among different repositories (including related services) are well responding to the expectations.

Now we are again in a new process of definition, where the EOSC Association shapes the new Governance and establishes new collaboration methods. In 2021 I encourage the project to stay close to and establish constructive relations with the EOSC Association by means of the project partners that are candidate members. This will strengthen the project contribution to EOSC and reinforce the role of harmoniser and supporter for the adoption of EOSC.

In the past year, the collaboration with the other INFRAEOSC-05 projects has grown, but some aspects need to be reinforced towards a more efficient co-operation, and I am confident that EOSC-Nordic will support this. Looking forward to the forthcoming first-period assessment that I am sure will be extremely positive, I wish all the EOSC-Nordic project partners a fruitful 2021”.