INSIDE EOSC 01 – Suzanne Dumouchel
Andrew Dubber
Hi, and welcome to Inside EOSC, a podcast all about the inner workings of the European Open Science Cloud. I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m a professor in innovation, a senior researcher at the Industry Commons Foundation, and a consortium member of an EOSC project called LUMEN.
And each month I introduce, with no apologies made for the terrible pun, luminaries, people who are central to the LUMEN project and also to the wider EOSC ecosystem. Today’s guest, our first guest, is Director of the EOSC Association, Head of International Cooperation for CNRS, the French National Research Agency, and importantly, the coordinator of the EOSC project, LUMEN, Suzanne Dumouchel. Welcome, Suzanne.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Thank you. Hi, everyone.
Andrew Dubber
Suzanne, we had a little bit of a chat before we met together, and there was a few surprises for me in your background and your approach to science and to the humanities, which is a very important part of LUMEN. So let’s just start with how does somebody with an academic background in 18th century literary newspapers come to lead the European scientific community?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yes, I think it’s a kind of behaviour, or way of living, which means actually showing or being interested in several types of activities and several initiatives. And while I was working on the 18th century newspaper, I was focussing on the public discourse and the relationship between the citizens and the speeches of the experts and of the authors of the research, the scientists of this century. I think it’s quite natural regarding this policy context of the open science.
Andrew Dubber
It does seem like there’s a connecting thread maybe of information as a way of organising the world.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Sure. Yeah, definitely. How to share information, how to spread information and the quality of information as well.
Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. So do you think of yourself as a scientist?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Previously, yes. And now I’m not sure I’m still a scientist. At least I’m passionate about science and I’m quite good at managing science, more something like that.
Andrew Dubber
All right. How do you make that distinction? What is a scientist?
And particularly in a European context, what makes a scientist?
Suzanne Dumouchel
It’s not the same skills. When you are a scientist, you need to take time. You need to have time in order to really reflect and develop an original and innovative thought.
And when you are in the context of the research infrastructure, in the context of the open science policy, in the context of the European and Horizon Europe programme, you need to be a bit fast, actually. So it doesn’t work well when you want to really do proper science.
Andrew Dubber
Sure. OK. So this is the Inside EOSC podcast.
You’re the head of the EOSC community, essentially. We should probably start with what is EOSC?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Oh, so it’s a very long story, so I will try to be brief. What is EOSC? EOSC stands for European Open Science Cloud.
It’s an initiative coming both from the community and the European Commission. Not with the same scope, but now emerging, working all together to really address the needs of the researchers by providing, developing and merging the technologies and the infrastructure in all scientific domains and in all the European countries.
Andrew Dubber
How would you describe it to somebody from outside the research world?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Providing the necessary tools to conduct proper research and to facilitate innovation. Very simply.
Andrew Dubber
I have to say, I still don’t know what that looks like. When you say it’s a cloud, is it computers? When you say tools, is it software?
What would I point to if I was pointing at EOSC?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yeah, the fact is that it covers everything from the low infrastructure with computing, analysis, analysing and storage and this type of things to the tools and the simple software to analyse data, to just enrich the data and it addresses the publication, the software, the data, also the research assessment. So every type. So it covers all the aspects from the low infrastructure to the software.
And it’s not really a cloud as such, not like the Google Cloud, for instance. It’s more a federation. This is why we called it now the EOSC Federation, meaning that it federates all the resources, tools and infrastructure already built everywhere in Europe in the scientific institution.
Andrew Dubber
And open. Why open?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Why open? Because first, science, closed science doesn’t exist. You know, it’s so it’s yeah, it’s quite logical.
And also to highlight the fact that we want to work openly between the domain, across the domain, but also across the culture and also with the industry and within societies. So what we want with EOSC is also increase the impact of science for the benefits of societies.
Andrew Dubber
Is there a tension between open.. I’m thinking of open source software, for instance. Is there a tension between open in EOSC with the idea of traditional forms of intellectual property?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So it’s a kind of tension, but it’s not so complicated to solve it. What the community has developed since a couple of years now is a licensing to authorise people to reuse, republish or even adapt the scientific content. So with that, we have covered the most important issues with the intellectual properties.
Andrew Dubber
OK, so it sounds almost like a kind of utopian vision of, you know, all of the science is all accessible to everybody at all times. To what extent is that happening? Is it being realised?
And to what extent is it having the sort of acceleration idea to discovery that that sounds like it might do?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So in my view, it is an utopia. That’s for sure. Doesn’t mean that it cannot exist, but not exactly in this very simple and ideal world, you know.
What we want to.. with some of.. There are a couple of issues with EOSC, for instance, the main one is the sustainability. So even if we want an open and open EOSC and open infrastructure where we want to share data and so on, this cannot be done for free.
So at some point, someone will have to pay. And this is where the relationship with the industry, but also the differences between a rich university and a poor one or a rich country and a poor one can create some issues. So it’s not done yet.
The ambition is huge. It’s probably one of the most important objectives that the scientists, the whole scientific community wans to achieve since 20 or even 50 years ago. You know, it’s really a very big, big goal.
And I think it will be… we will see the first benefit not before 5 to 10 years for the societies. It’s something that we create for the long time, not for a very quick impact.
Andrew Dubber
Right. So it’s a work in progress.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Sure. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
How far have we come?
Suzanne Dumouchel
How far? At least we have today the design and the global architecture of the Federation. The community is more and more acknowledged with what we have to do and what is still what still needs to be done.
And the governance is almost well understood from the member states, the European Commission and the community. So a lot of work has been done already, but now working on interoperability is very long. So we still have to address a lot of topics on this aspect.
And the older user, the user onboarding, which is the most long, long activity to do. So we will need probably 5 to 10 years to train, learn and acknowledge people about that.
Andrew Dubber
And when you say users, do you mean academic researchers particularly?
Suzanne Dumouchel
First, yes, of course. And then probably industry, probably citizens. But at least let’s focus on the researcher and the students, because they are very important also in the scope.
Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
It sounds like a lot of the technical work has been done, but the human part’s a little bit harder.
Suzanne Dumouchel
It’s always harder, you know, because when you want to build interoperability between technical tools, you just have to adapt the vocabularies and the technical aspect of the tools. But when you want to make sure that also between people, we can understand each other and we know what are the pros, the cons, what are the constraints. That takes much more time because we need to talk and we need to learn from each other.
So even between two people, it can be long, it can be quite long and complex. So imagine for 27 countries, it’s quite hard. So, yeah.
Andrew Dubber
Yeah, right, for sure. So, OK, let’s let’s finally I’m going to zero in on the word science. Is there a definition of what is and what is not science?
I know we’re going to be talking about the social sciences. Is there a point at which people are going, yeah, that doesn’t really count as science anymore? And where does that line fit?
Suzanne Dumouchel
You mean regarding the EOSC or regarding the scientific domain as such?
Andrew Dubber
From EOSC’s perspective, what’s in and what’s out? Who gets to play, who doesn’t?
Suzanne Dumouchel
OK, from the EOSC’s perspective, I can say that all the scientific domains are in. With very different steps of level of development, but all the scientific domains are in, even social science and humanities, who provide a lot of tools and infrastructure. So no issues regarding that.
However, at some point, what might be a bit tricky is the distinction between social science and humanities on one side and the cultural heritage on the other side, because cultural heritage is very close to humanities with the history, geographical understanding and so on. But it’s also something quite specific because it address the culture of countries and culture means also museum, means also relationship with the public. So it creates other type of questions, not really issues, but at least questions to be considered.
But still, what we try to do, at least in social science and humanities, is to keep cultural heritage within us to make sure that we don’t lose part of what we do.
Andrew Dubber
Right. And to what extent, because it’s a cloud and everything sort of contained within it, I guess, to what extent is interoperability? I know that the word FAIR and we’re going to talk about this in a second, but to what extent is interoperability across domains important to EOSC?
Suzanne Dumouchel
I’m not sure it’s important to EOSC, but it’s important to the scientific communities to make sure they can increase and develop their science thanks to the knowledge and the tools and the practises of other domains. So it’s more something like that. And this is where… it’s not important to EOSC, but thanks to EOSC, we’ve been able to develop and strengthen cross-collaboration, cross-fertilisation between domains.
Andrew Dubber
Right.
Suzanne Dumouchel
That’s already an impact of the EOSC.
Andrew Dubber
And I guess it’s probably true of most things in the world, but I guess this is enabled by digital technologies. This is not something that you could have done, let’s say, 50 years ago.
Suzanne Dumouchel
So I’m not sure about that, actually, because, you know, in astronomy, they started to do that. It was already 50 or even 70 years ago. So they had this previous knowledge.
So, of course, technologies help, but it’s also a kind of willingness. And as soon as you have enough developed your own domain, you want to open it to other domains in order to go further. So it’s also a kind of progressive approach.
And the technologies brings most of the support for that and help us to go faster. But even before, you know, we have, especially in social science and humanities, a lot of books have been published that were inspired by very different types of sciences.
Andrew Dubber
Interesting. One term you come across, and I mentioned this just a moment ago, but one term you always come across when you’re dealing with anything to do with the EOSC is the idea of FAIR data. And it’s not what most people mean when they say the word FAIR.
It’s obviously an acronym because we love acronyms so much in the European context. Tell me what FAIR data is and why it’s important.
Suzanne Dumouchel
So FAIR, yes. What does it mean, this acronym? FAIR, the F is for findable.
So being able to find data, but also find tools. Now we speak also about find FAIR tools, FAIR infrastructure and so on. So how to find the resource.
The A is for accessible. So making sure that this data or this resource is accessible, not only, but also for disabled people. So also considering very type of needs, very different types of needs in terms of accessibility.
The I is for interoperability. And here, very often, too often, we focus on the technical interoperability. But what we more and more do is also mention the legal interoperability and human interoperability to make sure we don’t forget this type of aspect.
And the R is for reusable, saying that we don’t want to create new data and new tools, but making sure that we are also able to reuse what is already existing. So I guess with this type of answer, I show that FAIR is completely part of the open science policy and should be, is logically at the core of the building of the EOSC.
Andrew Dubber
I have to ask, what do you mean when you say human interoperability?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yeah, so human interoperability, it’s exactly the fact that when you have two institutions, two teams in different institutions working on the technical interoperability of a tool, before working on the technical interoperability, they need to learn from each other to build a relationship. This is a first step of the human interoperability. And then if one of them in the institution leaves, sometimes and very often, actually, the relation is broken.
Because it’s not only the technical interoperability that was important, but it’s also the relationship between the two people that were maintaining this link and this technical interoperability. So what we need to develop is also making sure that as soon as one of the people is leaving from an institution, we have a kind of mechanism replacement to make sure that also all the technical developments that have been made are still valid and working.
Andrew Dubber
Does that come down to documentation? Or…
Suzanne Dumouchel
Sure. Yeah, exactly.
Andrew Dubber
Right. Okay. I understand.
All right. So EOSC, FAIR Data, solved, LUMEN. Tell me, what is LUMEN?
What are we doing? What are we trying to achieve?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So LUMEN is an ambitious project, a three-year project that started in January 2025 with a consortium of 21 partners and a budget of a bit less than 6 million euros. And what we want altogether to achieve is to increase the discovery experience of the users through the building of different discovery platforms. So we have already a first one that came from the TRIPLE project, which is the GoTriple platform, which is focused on Social Science and Humanities.
And what we want to do within the LUMEN project is to reuse the model, the framework of the GoTriple platform for other domains, such as Molecular Dynamics, Earth Science and Mathematics. So at the end of the LUMEN project, we will have four platforms, one for each of these domains that I just mentioned, and all these platforms will be interoperable. That means if you are in the GoTriple platform for the Social Science and Humanities and you are looking for a resource that can relate to Earth Science or Molecular Dynamics or Mathematics, you will get also the result of the other platform.
But why did we decide to have four platforms and not only one? It’s to make sure that each platform is completely and fully targeted to the scientific community it serves. So not saying one platform fits for all, because it doesn’t work like that.
Each scientific community has very different types of needs in terms of tools, softwares, in terms of data, in terms of vocabularies. So the hardest work we have to do in LUMEN is to make sure we shape very precise platform for each community. And then these platforms are still able to dialogue and to be interoperable.
And thanks to these four platforms, we will provide a White Label Platform that can be then designed and adapted for any other scientific community that is not targeted in the LUMEN project. But we can say, OK, I would like to have my own platform for physicists, for any scientific domain. So that’s pretty much the overall goal of the LUMEN project.
Andrew Dubber
Right. It does sound like the way that you describe it, this is a software development project. That we have this thing, it’s essentially a search engine for Social Sciences and Humanities. We want to amend the code or the front end so that it works better with other scientific domains. What’s the hard problem that makes it a three year, 21 organisation activity rather than just a contract and software development task?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Very good question indeed. So first, because it’s not only a search engine, the core of each platform is a search engine. But each of the platforms add a couple of innovative services to enhance the discovery experience through either visualisations, through chatbot, through…
We provide several tools that each scientific domain will say, OK, I want to plug it to my own platform or I don’t want it. And we will have….So that’s one of the things. So it’s not only a single search engine, but the other thing is that we won’t only harvest data and resource and then put it in the search engine and that’s it.
What we do each time is to enrich all the data we receive to all the data we harvest. And for this enrichment, what we need is to align all the vocabularies in each scientific domain. So, for instance, when we did that for GoTriple in Social Science and Humanities, Social Science and Humanities that means 27 scientific domains.
So 27 vocabularies that we needed to align all together and that we aligned in different languages because the GoTriple platform has now 11 or 12 languages. So the work done in terms of ontologies, aligning vocabularies is completely incredible. It’s a bit crazy, actually.
And we have to do that also for Earth Science, for Mathematics and for Molecular Dynamics. And then we need to make sure that all these vocabularies can also be understood from one domain to another. And for instance, the information concept is quite clear in Social Science and Humanities.
But in Astronomy, it’s not used at all in the same way. In Mathematics, it’s also different. So we need to make sure that when you write information in your keywords to look for results, you can really precise what type of information you are looking for, what concept linked to information you are looking for.
Andrew Dubber
It does seem like the scientific domains selected for LUMEN were chosen for how different they are from each other. So if you were looking for something that was as different as possible from Social Science and Humanities, you’d go immediately to Mathematics. And if you wanted something that was different from Mathematics and Social Sciences, you’d go to Molecular Dynamics.
And if you again, you’d keep going out from there. How were those selected? How were those scientific domains chosen for inclusion in LUMEN?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So it was not a scientific process for the selection to be completely transparent. It was more because it was a demand from the communities themselves who came to me saying, OK, we have seen the GoTriple platform and we would like to have something similar for us or to improve what we already have. So I’ve been contacted by Molecular Dynamics, Earth Science and Mathematics.
So then we said, OK, let’s work together and let’s address this challenge together.
Andrew Dubber
Right. And there was a funding call that kind of met the brief a little bit and you put together a proposal on that basis?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Exactly. Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
Right. So at the end of the three years, what results is there? We have four interoperable, but very different platforms for these different scientific domains.
And then the funding runs out and how are they supported? What continues from there?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Exactly. So that’s one of the big challenges that we have to address during the LUMEN project is to address the governance and the sustainability of this platform. It’s almost done for GoTriple in Social Science and Humanities, but it’s still ..it’s always an open question for this type when you want to develop a scientific infrastructure. And we need to address that for Earth Science, Molecular Dynamics and Mathematics. And here, several options are ahead of us.
So first, maybe the communities themselves would like to have a separate governance just for their own tools and own platform. And that’s it. We can also maybe think about how to onboard our discovery platforms in different EOSC nodes to make sure that what we provide, what we will deliver is part of the EOSC Federation, is used by the users of the EOSC Federation, and then can find some support from the national ministries or from the European Commission.
But it’s completely open. You know, we started only six months ago and we have to work on a proper plan for the governance. My objective is that I would like at the end of the LUMEN project, making sure that all the partners willing to stay involved into the governance of this platform are able to sign an MoU.
So I would like to have something very concrete, making sure that we don’t have six months or a year with nothing, but already everything prepared to launch the next step.
Andrew Dubber
The word interoperable has come up in the context of EOSC and of LUMEN as we’ve talked. But it does seem like a hard thing to picture a mathematics platform for finding research, being interoperable in some way with a Social Sciences and Humanities platform for research. How do you make that interoperability work?
What does that look like?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So first, we have this feeling that probably Social Sciences and Humanities and Mathematics are very far, but it’s not the case at all. What is very interesting, and this is what we discovered by working all together, is that in Mathematics, the Mathematics community is also a community that publishes a lot of books and still a lot of journals. So, of course, they have data, but they have also the same type of question that we have in Social Sciences and Humanities.
How about open access, about publication of books, the quality of open peer review and all these type of elements. So how do we address the interoperability? Is having common tools that are relevant for the different communities?
Andrew Dubber
I guess my question is really, are there any valuable connections? Is there a researcher that you imagine who is going to want to find results in more than one domain and put them together somehow in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without the LUMEN project?
Suzanne Dumouchel
OK, in my view, there won’t be a lot. Because it’s a very specific type of researcher who really tries to open his domain to be fed by some others. But this is where you really create the discovery and the serendipity of the research activity.
And maybe I can give one example, a concrete one. When I did my PhD on the French literary newspaper in the 18th century, I added a last chapter where I compared actually the process, the information flow in the newspaper of the 18th century and the information flow and the relationship with the citizens in the social media of the 21st century. So, of course, two completely different types of documents and resources.
And I used a lot of documentation and books about the concept of information through the physics domain, especially information in the Big Bang, because what they say is that information is the first, is what was before the Big Bang and before the Earth and the whole system, the universe has been created. So it was completely far from my own domain, but it helped me to just open a new perspective on what I was doing. And I think this is also this type of aspect that makes a scientist a scientist, not doing only the question that we have and where we need to find an answer, but making sure that we open a kind of a bridge to say, OK, but can I understand this question a bit differently?
Can I open a bit my perspective? And this is the raison d’etre of the LUMEN project as well.
Andrew Dubber
So serendipity is a great word to describe it. The idea that something might actually surprise you that you might not otherwise have thought of. I think that’s a really nice way of thinking about it.
But sharing information, there’s two ways of looking at that. And there are very different, I guess, personalities is the wrong word, but even politics behind that, where there are some people who will view, like you do, the idea of sharing information as the Big Bang that unlocks all this potential and possible innovation and so on. But there are people who look at sharing information as a loss of power, as something that was mine.
If everybody has it, then it’s not mine anymore and I don’t have the edge and I don’t have that anymore. Is that a problematic thing that needs to be worked out? Do you encounter that in the scientific domains?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yes, definitely, especially because scientists sometimes have a kind of important ego. So, yes, we need to address that as well. But I think it depends how you conceive a project or research or science.
It’s either you focus and you think that your intelligence can be enough, or you recognise that actually all the work that you do, that you have published and that you want to achieve is the result of a collective intelligence. And the more you will share information, the more intelligence you will create, you will contribute to create for you, of course, but also for the others. So you will be able to go further.
And there is a lot of books on that, actually, about the benefits of collective intelligence. And I think this is also the very important strength of the EOSC, by helping all of us to work together and to achieve this important objective. And it’s the same in LUMEN, in a smaller perspective.
Andrew Dubber
I can imagine somebody looking at the LUMEN project and going, oh, they’re helping researchers find information about their field. That’s fantastic. Oh, they’re helping discover and serendipity.
And that’s really great. And they’re using AI. I might have a few problems with that.
There are ethical dimensions to that, whether it’s ecological or whether it’s intellectual property or whether it’s, you know, the robots are going to rise up and kill us all. What is being considered from that perspective when we’re starting to introduce LLMs to these research fields and other AI tools?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So first, it’s also a very important question here. And I would like to thank you for that. We cannot, so we can have this first way of doing, which is, okay, I’m afraid of AI or I’m sure it will be bad or it can be dangerous.
It is dangerous, actually. I’m convinced it is dangerous. And then we close everything.
But, you know, it’s just being blind because we know that today, most of the people are using ChatGPT or other type of similar tools. So it’s just giving this type of power to the same people, the same US people, you know, instead of saying, okay, let’s try to build a tool that can be with proper value, with better quality because it has a scientific resource. And this is what we decided to do.
So how to make sure that this LLM can be ethical, can reduce, because you cannot have no bias at all, but at least reduce the gender bias, for instance. We know that there are a lot in the LLM, but also making sure that it has scientific and qualitative content, not all the bad internet content that we can find. This is what we want to do.
So saying, okay, let’s try to address and to work with technologies and also to develop and rely on AI because this is where we are now, but making sure that we secure that in order to stay safe and also to show the fact that we can build values even with innovative technologies. And personally, this is something I’m completely involved in to make sure. So I’ve been at…last year, there was at the Digital Governance for AI on Purpose in New York City.
And I’m very, I’m doing all my best actually to make sure or to contribute to the different initiatives to show that innovative technologies can be developed based on values and the human values and not market values.
Andrew Dubber
That’s an even more interesting way of the thing that I was going to point to, because you mentioned values earlier on and the distinction between human values and market values is a really possibly provocative distinction to make. And maybe that’s just the world we live in now. But I’m going to ask the question, or maybe this is an even more provocative thing to do, but is values the thing that makes this a European project?
Suzanne Dumouchel
So, considering the fact that we are in August 2025 and the current worldwide situation, I think I can say yes.
Andrew Dubber
Say more, say more, that’s interesting.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yeah, but the fact is that I don’t know what will be the future. I don’t know if what is the strength of Europe that we have right now will stay as it is. So I hope so, of course.
I also hope so that some US decisions will change and that we will find and rediscover the US as before. So, you know, I cannot say, but yes, this is why in Europe we continue to focus, I think, at least on values, even if we cannot forget the market, because not everything is bad in the market and we all know that. So, yeah, it’s not white and black, you know, but just making sure that if we have to decide, we promote the values while still supporting the market.
Andrew Dubber
Because I’m aware this is a publicly funded project, LUMEN, but there is a very clear look towards sustainability and sustainability not just being from, you know, when we normally talk about sustainability, we’re talking about, are we recycling our plastics? But, I mean, from commercial and, well, economic sustainability, can we continue to pay for this to be a thing that exists? And it does seem like, from my experience of LUMEN so far, there is an openness and a willingness to look towards commercial organisations to find uses for something that comes out of LUMEN.
How much of that is sort of built into the project and how much of that is just the thing we have to do because that’s the world we live in today?
Suzanne Dumouchel
No, no, actually, it’s a strong willingness. You know, if you build tools that at the end are not very useful for the society, I don’t see the point. The very important added value of LUMEN is that, of course, it provides very important platform for the researchers, that’s good.
But even without this platform, the researchers were still able and will be still able to provide new publications, new data and so on. What is really interesting here is that we can also increase the relationship and a better knowledge between the scientific community and the media, the public institutions, the SMEs. So we create values, actually.
And when I say values, it’s not the human values, but also value in terms of market. We create value because we show that what is done by the scientific community is very relevant to either understand some societal challenges, to contribute to innovative technologies, to develop new market activities. So this is what we want to do is to have an impact on societies, not only on research.
Andrew Dubber
We talk about these sorts of things as being, I mean, obviously, market value being an important thing, but the values built into a European funded project being European values. And I’m sort of struck by the distance between this idea of there being a single, shared, universally accepted value that Europeans have when Europe is so diverse and so complex and so much different cultural history and perspectives and views of the world. Can you locate within Europe, even if it’s negatively, well, we’re not that or we do this differently, is there something that you can point to and go, this is what makes us European as a project.
It’s not just that we happen to be situated on this continent, but this is something about us and the way we think about science or collaboration or openness or whatever it is, that is a European trait that we hold on to as being part of our identity.
Suzanne Dumouchel
That’s a very interesting question. I’m not sure I have a clear answer about it. What I can say is that in Europe, historically, and this is where we have the importance of social science and humanities, historically, the different kingdoms have been developed and created and raised thanks to weddings between the same families.
So that means that even if everything has changed now, because it’s not anymore kingdom and so on in most of the European countries, at least we have a long common history with the religion, of course, with the territory, but also with the wedding we had between the Spanish king and the French queen and so on, and there are a lot of stories about that. So probably we have a very strong common history and very long, because at the beginning when you asked your question, I thought, OK, we have a common history, that’s for sure, which is not the same as in the United States, where their history is much shorter than us. But it’s not true if we consider China, for instance, which has also a very long history, or the Arabian country.
What maybe makes the difference with Europe is the fact that we created a lot of relationships and weddings and relations and markets between the different countries, which is probably a bit different than in China with the countries around them. So it can be part of the answer. I’m sure it’s not the only answer, but yeah, at least for today, it can be enough.
Andrew Dubber
It gives us a really nice context to sit all of these things within, because we are talking about big topics. We’re talking about science, we’re talking about innovation, we’re talking about all these sorts of things. And that, to me, is interesting because what we’re talking about when we talk about these things is the idea of progress, the idea of society moving forward because we discover new things, we cure diseases, we discover new molecular compounds, we solve mathematical conundrums, these things, and humanity moves forward.
And it’s really interesting for me to hear that situated within a.. this is what it’s for, this is why we do what we do. And so I think thinking about these things, even though really, at one end what we’re doing is a software development project about interacting, you mnow, with a corpus of research, but because it’s European funded, because it’s from public money, this idea of progress, I think, it comes across in what you say, which I think is really great to hear because that puts that into perspective.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Yeah.
Andrew Dubber
But if LUMEN is successful, from a funder’s perspective, there will be essentially four, they could look at four search engines and go, yep, tick that box, you did what we said, here is the money, you’ve done your job. From your perspective, how will you know or when will you know that LUMEN has been a success?
Suzanne Dumouchel
In 10 years and not before because the users onboarding takes a lot of time, I know that. Even in a single country, when you develop a single tool, it takes a lot of time to appropriate and to take cues and to take the habit to use the tool. So I know that in an European context, it will be much longer, so I’m prepared already to see a very important and relevant impact in only seven to 10 years, I would say.
And how? So first, if we have new projects that emerge in this timeframe that are the result of the merging of several scientific communities working together to address a new question that I don’t have in mind, but that can be the result of Mathematics and Molecular Dynamics and our system, for instance. But also if tomorrow we have media, for instance, or public institutions that want to address the challenge they face by reusing the results of the scientific community, that would be great.
So instead of launching a new study, which has already been done 10 times in the scientific community, let’s help them to reuse what we have done and to be able to go further and to address what they want to address thanks to us.
Andrew Dubber
I feel like you’ve kind of just answered my question a little bit, but I still want to ask it in case there is a bigger picture here, which is: what do you see as the next big challenge for open science in Europe?
Suzanne Dumouchel
To make sure that it won’t be closed again.
Andrew Dubber
Is that a possibility?
Suzanne Dumouchel
We don’t know, but we can see that politically a lot of European countries, and not only European, but everywhere in the world, several countries try to close a bit more the barriers and to think a bit more nationally and a bit less globally. So yes, open science, which is exactly the way scientists want to work since thousands of years, not thousands, maybe hundreds of years. Now we are supported by our ministries and by the different policies.
Let’s be sure that we will still be supported by them and not be obliged to work against closed policies.
Andrew Dubber
Okay, fantastic. Let’s finish by bringing this back to you. If you weren’t doing this right now and you’d taken a different trajectory, what would you be doing right now?
What’s the different thing that you could see yourself instead of this, what would be your life?
Suzanne Dumouchel
Instead of LUMEN, EOSC.., what would be my life?
Andrew Dubber
Where could it have gone?
Suzanne Dumouchel
In two different or two of the same directions, but either as a researcher in my own old libraries, continuing studying newspapers alone in a quiet environment, or teaching yoga. Yeah, that would be also, this is still something I have in mind, but my career is not finished, so it’s still open.
Andrew Dubber
Fantastic. Those both sound like incredibly appealing things to do, and as the world changes, they might be things to run away to as well. Suzanne, it’s been a really interesting conversation.
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Suzanne Dumouchel
Thank you, Andrew. Thanks a lot for the lovely questions, and yeah, very happy to be there. Thank you.
Andrew Dubber
That’s Suzanne Dumouchel, Director of the EOSC Association, Head of International Cooperation for the French National Research Agency, CNRS, and the Coordinator of the EOSC Project, LUMEN. And that’s Inside EOSC, a podcast from theLUMEN Project, which receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme. I’m Andrew Dubber.
I’m back next month with an interview with another luminary from the world of the European Open Science Cloud. You can subscribe to Inside EOSC wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening.