The ambition of the European Open Science Cloud, known as EOSC, is to develop a ‘Web of FAIR Data and Services’ for science in Europe. The implementation of EOSC is based on a long-term process of alignment and coordination pursued by the Commission since 2015.
EOSC stands at the intersection of Europe’s strategic priorities, offering solutions to critical challenges in research, innovation, and societal development. As a transformative tool, EOSC fosters digital sovereignty, inclusivity, trust, and transparency in the research and innovation domain.
EOSC is designed not only to support the Open Science movement but also to underpin Europe’s broader competitiveness agenda. The deployment of a network between data repositories and services will be instrumental for Open Science to progress in Europe. For all of these reasons, the EOSC Federation of nodes is being created.
The ambition of the European Open Science Cloud, known as EOSC, is to develop a ‘Web of FAIR Data and Services’ for science in Europe. EOSC will be a multi-disciplinary environment where researchers can publish, find and re-use data, tools and services, enabling them to better conduct their work.
EOSC builds on existing infrastructure and services supported by the European Commission, Member States and research communities. It brings these together in a federated ‘system of systems’ approach, adding value by aggregating content and enabling services to be used together.
This environment will operate under well-defined conditions to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest. Expectations of service providers and users will be made explicit to ensure appropriate behaviour.
Empowering Europe’s trusted, secure and sovereign research data ecosystem
EOSC secures Europe’s sovereignty over research data, enables a thriving AI and innovation ecosystem, increases security in research, strengthens the Single Market for knowledge, and ensures that European values—openness, trust, and fairness—remain the foundation of global collaborative science.
EOSC will also improve the situation for researchers in many ways, namely by:
- Enhancing scientific research by providing access to a weath of data and research outputs from various fields and institutions.
- Fostering innovation by making it easier for researchers to share, collaborate and build on each others’ work.
- Improving transparency and reproducibility of research by making data and methods more open and accessible.
- Reducing data silos and duplication of efforts by promoting data sharing and reuse.
- Facilitating interdisciplinarity research and cross-sectoral collaboration by making data and resources from different domains more easily available.
EOSC in the EU context
EOSC and the EOSC Federation have been called out on several occasions in 2025 as a key structural element for the advancement of European competitiveness in research and innovation, including:
- In the European Council’s recommendations on the ERA Policy Agenda, where EOSC is reaffirmed as a key element of Priority Area 1: Deepening a truly functioning internal market for knowledge;
- In the September 2025 European Strategy on Research and Technology Infrastructures, where the EC pledges to develop actions in support of “aligning and coordinating investments across Europe for trusted and secure storage, processing and sharing of critical data including through EOSC”; and
- In the fall 2025 strategies for AI in Science, Apply AI, and the Data Union, where EOSC is identified as a critical enabler of AI in science and by providing access to interoperable and reusable datasets.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a key enabler of the digitalisation of research infrastructures while delivering the European Data Space for research data. It has potential to become the most generally used infrastructure in Europe.
The Heitor report
Heitor et al. Align, Act, Accelerate: Research, technology and innovation to boost European competitiveness
