Last week, the EOSC community gathered in Brussels for EOSC Symposium 2025, demonstrating how the EOSC Federation is taking shape and how collaboration across national, thematic, and infrastructure providers is becoming reality. For the EOSC EU Node, the event was a milestone and a moment of reflection: One year since its launch, the Node anchors the transition of the EOSC Federation from concept to reality.
One year from the launch of the EOSC EU Node
EOSC Symposium 2025 marked one year since the EOSC EU Node entered production. Over this period, we have welcomed a growing community of researchers with varied needs, from exploratory test users to research groups ready to scale workloads into production.
Peter Szegedi, Policy Officer at DG CNECT, European Commission, highlighted the following achievements from the first year of the EOSC EU Node:
- Welcomed 4,000 users and distributed over 2.5 million virtual credits through user wallets.
- Launched an updated website and User Space with a more user-friendly interface, updated resources and training materials.
- Introduced perpetual file storage – for the lifetime of the EOSC EU Node - and increased resource allocations.
- Updated the User Access Policy, incorporating valuable community feedback.
- Strengthened security, compliance, and operational excellence, fully aligned with EU frameworks.
- Released the open-source code for the EOSC EU Node’s core capabilities, fostering transparency, reusability, and public access to digital research tools.
- Supported the build-up of the EOSC Federation, contributing to its creation, expansion, and maturity. 13 Candidate Nodes engaged, 10 nodes enrolled, and over 70 services and 60 resources made discoverable through the Resource Hub in testing.
At EOSC Symposium, two federation-critical capabilities were also demonstrated: Single sign-on across nodes and a federated file sync and share solution, both pointing towards the next major phase: moving the EOSC Federation into full production, where the remaining work shifts from technical enablers to legal and organisational alignment.
Building the EOSC Federation
A year on from the launch of the EOSC EU Node at the EOSC Symposium 2024, the Federation has evolved significantly and during this period, the EOSC EU Node became the technical and organisational backbone supporting interoperability between emerging national, thematic, and infrastructural nodes. 13 candidate nodes, joined the first wave of the build-up process, working side-by-side to define the core principles and mechanisms for federation.
This collaborative work has resulted in:
- Consensus on key technical requirements, including federated AAI and federated catalogues as mandatory foundations.
- Recommendations for operational capabilities, such as workflow execution, monitoring, accounting, helpdesk integration, and management systems.
- A shared Memorandum of Understanding, outlining the mutual commitments between EOSC Association and the Nodes.
- The first iteration of the EOSC Federation Handbook, published earlier this year and now entering a revision phase to integrate lessons from onboarding.
Case studies from the EOSC Federation build-up
During EOSC Symposium 2025, the EOSC Life Science Connect Node shared its progress in aligning AAI and service catalogues with the EOSC EU Node. As a thematic node representing many institutions and research infrastructures, its experience highlights the importance of governance models that can support distributed responsibility, shared consensus, and sustainable operations. The ongoing collaboration demonstrates the potential of thematic nodes to enable both broad representation and technical interoperability.
Behind the scenes, onboarding of services to the EOSC EU Node from major research infrastructures is progressing, with platforms such as CERN ESCAPE VRE, REANA, Indico, Zenodo, and the NFDI Galaxy currently in testing. All core components of the Node remain open source, ensuring reusability across the ecosystem.
Three scientific use cases were showcased at the EOSC Symposium, demonstrating what federation means in practice:
- REANA (CERN) – enabling FAIR reanalysis of extremely large Large Hadron Collider (LHC) datasets through federated workflow execution, making high-energy physics methods accessible to other fields.
- GALAXY – supporting four distinct scientific communities in running shared workflows transparently across distributed infrastructure, without requiring programming expertise.
- MCVAL (Prostate cancer screening) – enabling the secure, compliant validation of AI models on sensitive health data across multiple centres.
Each case demonstrated the value of federated authentication, distributed workflow execution, and cross-node resource utilisation, all central capabilities of the EOSC Federation.
Looking ahead
The first wave of enrolments has confirmed that building the EOSC Federation is both achievable and impactful, but also resource-intensive and dependent on close collaboration. As the ecosystem grows, onboarding processes will continue to evolve, offering flexibility in how nodes choose to federate their services.
The EOSC EU Node will now focus on:
- Supporting the transition into production use.
- Improving the process for new nodes and service providers to join.
- Continuing to demonstrate real-world, multi-node scientific workflows.
- Strengthening the shared understanding of what EOSC is, and why it matters.
The next year will be shaped by scaling: from first wave to broader adoption, from pilots to stable operations, and from technical readiness to a sustainable federation. And we look forward to continuing this work together.
Read more about the summary of the full 3-day event here.
