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EOSC-Nordic’s feedback on the Solutions for a Sustainable EOSC – A tinman report

Jonna Helenius
20.03.2020

On the request of the EOSC Sustainability Working Group, EOSC-Nordic gave feedback on “Solutions for a Sustainable EOSC – A tinman report”. The purpose of the feedback was to give the Working Group advice from the Nordic and Baltic perspective for further work on EOSC Sustainability.

To ensure the sustainability of EOSC, EOSC-Nordic recommends utilising a step-wise approach. In practice, this would mean emphasizing the functionality of the EOSC-Core on the first iteration, namely the science and research community. Other layers and serving public and private sectors would follow after.

Also, some of the most critical points that the EOSC Sustainability Working Group should take into account in further work are:

  • The EOSC-Core’s success will be defined by access to the needed resources, e.g. storage or computing resources. In further work, the willingness of resource providers to supply such resources should be elaborated. Especially their incentives for providing the scarce resources, such as storage or computing, need to be examined sufficiently.
  • EOSC-Exchange is still not sufficiently addressing the problems related to public service providers operating in privately-oriented markets – these challenges need to be tackled to provide a level playing field for all providers. Also, more analysis is needed about the relationship with other open science data providers and services outside the EU.
  • To achieve a sustainable funding model, it is crucial to examine and understand the prerequisites of member states’ financial commitments. Sufficient financial commitment will likely only be possible through a resource federation (including both national and institutional resources). Therefore, such models should be looked into.
  • The way forward that relies on member states putting additional funding towards infrastructures should be backed up with a dialogue with the relevant stakeholders – otherwise, the suggestion is merely an ideal, rather than a feasible way forward.
  • The key aspect to examine is the preparedness of funders to make new investments in the needed resources, or should already made investments, such as EuroHPC, be utilised.

Read the entire EOSC-Nordic feedback on the tinman report

Read the tinman report