EOSC

European Open Science Cloud

What is EOSC?

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a flagship initiative of the European Commission aimed at creating a single, federated digital environment where researchers across Europe can store, share, find, and reuse research data and services — across all disciplines and borders.

NoteKey facts
  • Announced in the European Open Science Cloud Declaration (2017)
  • Operational since 2021 under the governance of the EOSC Association
  • Integrated into Horizon Europe (2021–2027) as a core infrastructure
  • Connects hundreds of research organisations, data repositories, and service providers

EOSC is not a single platform or a single institution. It is a federated system of systems — a policy framework and technical interoperability layer that allows existing national and disciplinary infrastructures to work together.

Why Was EOSC Created?

European research was producing vast amounts of data stored in isolated, incompatible silos. EOSC addresses several structural problems:

  • Fragmentation: data spread across national repositories that don’t talk to each other
  • Reproducibility: lack of access to the data underlying published results
  • Efficiency: researchers reinventing the wheel because they can’t find existing datasets
  • Open science mandates: Horizon Europe requires open, FAIR, reusable data outputs

EOSC and the Humanities

For SSH researchers, EOSC is significant in several concrete ways:

Discoverability

Data deposited on Huma-Num (NAKALA), DARIAH, or CLARIN nodes becomes searchable through the EOSC Portal (eosc-portal.eu), alongside datasets from physics, biology, and other fields. This increases the visibility and citability of humanities research data.

FAIR as a Requirement

Horizon Europe grants increasingly require that research outputs — including data — comply with FAIR principles and be deposited in EOSC-compatible repositories. NAKALA, DARIAH services, and CLARIN centres all qualify.

Persistent Identifiers

EOSC promotes the use of PIDs (Persistent Identifiers) throughout the research lifecycle: ORCID for researchers, DOI/ARK for data and publications, ROR for institutions. Huma-Num already implements ARK identifiers in NAKALA.

Linked Open Data

EOSC fosters interoperability between disciplines: a historian’s dataset can be linked to geographical data from cartography, biographical records from national archives, and textual corpora from CLARIN — all through shared metadata standards.

EOSC and Huma-Num / DARIAH / CLARIN

Infrastructure Role in EOSC
Huma-Num Provides French SSH data (NAKALA) and services to EOSC via DARIAH-FR and CLARIN-FR
DARIAH-EU EOSC member; contributes SSH tools, training resources, and the SSH Marketplace
CLARIN ERIC EOSC member; contributes language resources, NLP tools, and the SSH Marketplace
SSH Open Marketplace Joint portal (DARIAH + CLARIN + CESSDA) integrated into EOSC as a discovery layer for SSH

The EOSC Association

Since 2020, EOSC is governed by the EOSC Association — a non-profit legal entity based in Brussels, bringing together research organisations, funders, universities, and infrastructures from across Europe.

Tip

CNRS and several French universities are members of the EOSC Association. UPPA researchers benefit indirectly through France’s national contributions to EOSC via Huma-Num, Renater, and other national partners.

🔗 https://eosc.eu/about/eosc-association

EOSC and Open Science Policy in France

EOSC is closely aligned with France’s Plan national pour la science ouverte (PNSO), which sets out national-level requirements for open access and FAIR data. Key articulations:

  • The Fonds National pour la Science Ouverte (FNSO) co-funds infrastructure aligned with EOSC
  • ANR grant conditions reference EOSC-compatible data deposition
  • Huma-Num is France’s main humanities gateway to EOSC

🔗 Plan national pour la science ouverte · EOSC Portal

Practical Implications for Doctoral Students

You may not interact with EOSC directly — but it shapes the environment in which your research data will live:

  1. DMP writing: when your DMP asks “where will your data be deposited?”, EOSC-compatible repositories (NAKALA, Zenodo, CLARIN centres) are the expected answer
  2. Horizon Europe applications: open science plans must reference EOSC
  3. Data discoverability: depositing on NAKALA or via DARIAH puts your data in the European research data ecosystem
  4. Interoperability by design: using standard formats and controlled vocabularies from the start makes your data EOSC-ready