Credits User Documentation

Credits are your virtual currency within the EOSC EU Node which you can spend to consume select services according to your permissions and needs.

Credits have no monetary value and are currently used exclusively in the EOSC EU Node to allow a fair, transparent, and equal access to its services and resources for the European research community.

Credits are provided to you free of charge (at the point of use) by the European Commission the first time you log in and are automatically renewed every three months. You can find all your spending history and remaining credits in your personal wallet. Please remember that you cannot transfer your credits to another person or between periods.

The exact amount of credits you receive, as well as your level of access to various services, are set automatically based on the affiliation information shared by your home organisation. For more information, please read how they work below and check the User Access Policy.

• Service Costs: Each service offer has a different cost, expressed in credits over a set period. For instance, a resource-intensive service may cost 10 credits per day, while another service may only cost 0.5 credits per day. You can view and compare the costs for all service offers on their respective pages.
• Consuming Credits: When you order a service for a specified period, the total credit cost of the service reservation will be deducted from your wallet. You can use your credits on any available service, provided you have sufficient credits in your wallet.
• Releasing a Service: If you cancel a service before the end of its reservation term, you will receive a refund in credits for the unused service duration in time.
• Requesting Additional Credits: Please use your credits responsibly, as they are replenished every three months and additional ones will not be provided to you. Feel free however to contact our Helpdesk in the case of special requests.
• Credits for Groups: When you create a group, a separate Group Wallet will automatically be generated. This wallet is independent of your personal wallet and comes pre-allocated with additional credits, which you can manage and spend in collaboration with your group members.

Your credits are allocated to you automatically, based on the affiliation information shared by your home organisation when you log in (home organisation, country, role). This information also automatically establishes the access levels you have in the EOSC EU Node for the services.

When you log in to the EOSC EU Node, you either select your home organisation from the list or choose the EU Login authentication option.

If you have found your home organisation, you will be redirected to your organisation’s normal log-in page, where you simply enter your home credentials. If enabled, your home organisation will then release to the EOSC EU Node the requested affiliation information. The supported Identity Providers (IdPs) for home organisations are currently:

• eduGAIN, which enables access to research resources worldwide for more than 27M users. If you are a researcher based in Europe, your home organisation is almost certainly a member of eduGAIN.
• EU Login, which is the European Commission’s user authentication service for a wide range of the Commission’s information systems. However, anyone can self-register and obtain an EU Login account.

Below is a summary of how the credits and access policies are automatically allocated to you. For more details and official information, please consult the User Access Policy.

• You get 500 credits, replenished every 3 months, and have access to all EOSC EU Node services, if:
  • You are affiliated as a Faculty member with an organisation registered in EU27 or Horizon Europe Associated Country via eduGAIN.
• You get 100 credits, replenished every 3 months, and have access to a subset of EOSC EU Node application services (File Sync & Share, Interactive Notebooks for Small environments, Large File Transfer Service), if:
  • You are affiliated as Employee or Staff with an organisation registered in EU27 or Horizon Europe Associated Country via eduGAIN.
  • You are affiliated as Staff of the European Commission and its agencies via EU Login.
• You do not get any credits although you have view-only access to the EOSC EU Node services, in any other successful authentication case.

Please first check your Settings page in the User Space and review what information is shared by your home organisation with the EOSC EU Node. If your affiliation information is missing or you think is incorrect, unfortunately it means that your home organisation does not release the required or correct information to the EOSC EU Node.

Please contact your home organisation’s IdP administrator first, and then the EOSC EU Node’s Helpdesk so we can get in touch with your home organisation and discuss releasing this information in the future. Until your home organisation takes action, you will unfortunately not have access to the EOSC EU Node services relevant to your actual status.

A Faculty member from a European university is preparing a new publication and decides to utilise the services and resources offered by the EOSC EU Node. The researcher logs in to the EOSC EU Node using their home credentials issued by the university. As a faculty member of a university from an EU27 country, the researcher automatically gets 500 credits allocated in their wallet for free, courtesy of the European Commission.

The researcher browses through the available services of their personal User Space —such as File Sync & Share, Virtual Machines, Cloud Container Platform, and Interactive Notebooks—and decides to use a particular service. Specifically, in our scenario, the researcher spends 10 credits for the File Sync & Share service (to store and share files and folders safely and securely) and 200 credits for deploying scientific software on Virtual Machines to perform experiments. As the researcher progresses with their experiment, the credits are automatically replenished every three months. This ensures a continuous allocation of credits to support ongoing research activities up to the limit of their wallet.

Midway through the first six months, the researcher has prepared a research software with particular configurations and wants to make it available to others to use. The researcher visits the Tools Hub, creates a TOSCA template automating the deployment of the software on the EOSC EU Node, and submits it for publishing. The tool will be validated and then publicly released to other users (also available in the Resource Hub), enabling them to deploy it automatically on the EOSC EU Node in a matter of minutes to reproduce the experiment.

The researcher then decides to prepare Jupyter Notebooks, which enable others to collaborate and extend the analysis of the published research work. For this reason, the researcher allocates credits on the Notebook service, carefully preparing and testing a collection of Notebooks to share with colleagues. However, the researcher realises that assistance and contributions are needed from others, and so creates a group project in the EOSC EU Node, inviting colleagues. They collectively now prepare and publish a series of portable Notebooks, which can be used for educational and research purposes within or outside the EOSC EU Node.

Throughout this journey, the EOSC EU Node supports the researcher at various stages of the research and scholarly communication lifecycle, enabling them to turn the vision of Open Science for Europe into practice.