Inside EOSC [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer] is a podcast produced by the LUMEN project. Therefore, it makes sense to start with the question: What is EOSC? Oddly, or perhaps not, when you ask four people what EOSC is, you get four different answers. What can one make of this? Perhaps, it is revealing of the nature of the European Open Science Cloud, and its complexity. Across the first four episodes of the Inside EOSC podcast, host Andrew Dubber puts the same deceptively simple question to each guest.

“The premise of the Inside EOSC podcast is simple. EOSC is built by people, and the easiest way to understand it is to listen to them. I went into these interviews expecting the answers to converge over time. They haven’t, and I think that’s the point. EOSC might be a single grand idea, but it isn’t the same thing to everyone. It’s an ongoing conversation and the sum of the people who are building it.” – Andrew Dubber

Starting with Suzanne Dumouchel [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer], Director of the EOSC Association and coordinator of the LUMEN project, she frames EOSC as an initiative born from both the research community and the European Commission to address researcher needs across all scientific domains and European countries. For outsiders, she simplifies: it is about providing the tools to conduct proper research and facilitate innovation. She rejects the “cloud” metaphor, insisting EOSC is not like Google Cloud. Rather, it is a federation, bringing together the resources, tools and infrastructure already built across European scientific institutions. And what about impact?

“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.” – Suzanne Dumouchel.

Sy Holsinger, CTO of OPERAS, traces EOSC [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer],  back to its technical roots. Having spent over a decade at European Grid Infrastructure (EGI), the distributed computing infrastructure that emerged from CERN’s work on the Large Hadron Collider, he sees EOSC as the logical next step. Multiple e-infrastructures and research infrastructures had grown up independently, each serving different communities, and researchers were being sent to too many places to find what they needed. The original idea, he explains, was to take the researcher’s perspective and bring services together in a more harmonised way. Over time, though, EOSC has become something broader: “almost an idea,” as he puts it, about how to turn a fragmented, publicly funded research landscape into a coherent system. What makes it distinctly European, he argues, is the emphasis on sustainability: the Commission began insisting that project results must outlive their funding, effectively turning research institutes into service providers.

Klaus Tochtermann, the newly elected president of the EOSC Association, [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer], offers a different narrative. He draws a clear line between the EOSC Association, the membership-based body where the people are, and the EOSC Federation, the technical infrastructure those people build and maintain. His overriding message to policymakers is about data sovereignty: EOSC exists to ensure European researchers retain ownership of their data and have insight into how it is used. And how is EOSC different from the rest of the world? 

“…in the US, the leading strategy is open labour markets, benefiting companies. In China, the strategy is state security, as they call it. And in Europe, it’s very much about the citizens. And that is why data sovereignty is so important to us, because we want the researchers to retain ownership of their data. So these are three different philosophies about how to deal with data.” – Klaus Tochtermann 

Finally, Fotis Psomopoulos, coordinator of the EVERSE project and a senior researcher at CERTH [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer], comes at EOSC from a different angle. A computer scientist in bioinformatics, he arrived at EOSC through a succession of research infrastructures: first EGI, then ELIXIR. His definition comes with a disclaimer: this is his perception, not a definitive statement. For him, EOSC is a European umbrella initiative that connects all open science efforts at national level and makes them interoperable. He acknowledges the full spectrum of interpretations and settles on a pragmatic answer: it is both a technical platform and a standards initiative. But what strikes him most, echoing Dumouchel, is that EOSC is ultimately a people thing. His main concern is that shared understanding of what open science actually means remains the critical bottleneck.

The many faces of EOSC, therefore, look like this: where one talks about human interoperability, another describes a European culture of sustained collaboration, without forgetting participatory governance. All four guests worry about sustainability, agreeing that infrastructure cannot survive on project funding alone.

Until our next blog post, feel free to listen to all of these perspectives through our dedicated podcast, Inside EOSC [Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Deezer].

This blog was written by Fotis Mystakopoulos, Open Scholarly Communication Officer at OPERAS and task lead of T8.5.