Federated services, data sources, and open-source components consolidate the shared European framework for interoperable, data-driven research.
The EOSC EU Node continues to play a crucial role in shaping the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation, supporting its build-up phase and acting as the first operational node and reference model for national and thematic nodes to be enrolled in the Federation. Its mission is to make the Federation a practical, interoperable reality that enables researchers across Europe to access and combine data, tools, and services seamlessly.
In the current build-up phase of the Federation, the contractors behind EOSC EU Node have been in close dialogue with the community and provided hands-on support to key Working Groups set up by the EOSC Association as well as to the EOSC Federation Build-up Group under the auspices of the EOSC Tripartite Governance. These efforts have been instrumental in translating policy into practice, notably through the AAI and Data Catalogues Sub-groups, which have reached a common understanding and defined shared specifications that are already progressing toward implementation.
As part of the ongoing testing phase of the EOSC Federation build-up, the EOSC EU Node has collaborated with organisations across Europe to expand its offering and complement the existing services available to researchers, including Zenodo, REANA, ESCAPE VRE, and Indico (provided by CERN), as well as Galaxy (provided by the Life Sciences community and NFDI). All these services, currently only accessible in the EOSC EU Node's testing environment for Node Candidates, are connected at different levels of interoperability and demonstrate how diverse tools and platforms can work together within a shared European research space.
In this phase, the EOSC EU Node is in the process of cataloguing 58 services from 6 candidate Nodes that are enrolling into the EOSC Federation: PaNOSC, EUDAT, EOSC Node SURF (The Netherlands), EOSC Node Digital Twin of the Ocean, EOSC Node Italy and EOSC Finland Node, alongside 7 new data sources from Data Terra and EOSC Node Poland in addition to the above. Together, these additions address both domain-specific and cross-disciplinary needs across all major scientific fields, revealing the breadth, diversity, and depth of European research and highlighting the collaborative strength that underpins the EOSC Federation.
Another key milestone for the EOSC Federation is the release of the open-source code for the EOSC EU Node, now publicly available under open licences with technical documentation. This release reinforces the European Commission’s commitment to transparency, reusability, and public access to digital research tools. It strengthens the foundations of the Federation by enabling openness and collaboration across nodes, providing a shared technical “blueprint” to build interoperable infrastructures. Covering all the services, the code allows new Nodes to reuse and adapt components, reducing development time and costs while ensuring full alignment within the wider EOSC ecosystem.
The EOSC EU Node remains fully committed to supporting the next steps of the EOSC Federation. Ongoing efforts will focus on strengthening interoperability, expanding service onboarding, and supporting the establishment of new nodes using the EOSC EU Node blueprint. Acting as the federator and enabler of this evolving ecosystem, the EOSC EU Node continues to drive the vision of a European ecosystem for research data and services, advancing open science and enabling data-driven discovery across all domains.
Stay tuned for more as new services, data sources and nodes continue to join in the months ahead.
Big developments are taking place this week in the EOSC Federation, read the EOSC Association press release, Welcome to the EOSC Federation: MoU establishes shared path to operations to learn more!
