The EOSC 2025 Symposium concluded yesterday, Wednesday 5 November, in Brussels, marking the first step in the operational phase of establishing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation, a project that aims to create a single digital space for sharing data and services to support open science and innovation in Europe. The event brought together 500 participants from more than 20 countries and saw significant attendance and participation from the European Commission, as well as the coordinators of the nodes that make up the first phase of the EOSC Federation. Among these was the ICSC – National Research Centre for HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, responsible for the Italian EOSC Node. This meeting provided an opportunity to discuss the organisational structure, technological solutions and first scientific use cases that will characterise the initiative. The result of eight months of intense work, these aspects were formalised in the Memorandum of Understanding signed by the President of the EOSC Association (EOSC-A) Klaus Tochtermann during the opening day of the symposium. This document will provide the operational framework for European organisations supporting the EOSC nodes.
Purpose of EOSC
Coordinated by the EOSC Association, together with the European Commission, EU Member States and associated countries, EOSC aims to facilitate access to scientific data and promote European growth through the federation of computing resources, databases and services for data management and analysis. To this end, the project aims to create a federated digital infrastructure of Nodes, Thematic Nodes and National Nodes, characterised by common technological paradigms that will enable the implementation of the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability and reusability) of Open Science, while strengthening European data sovereignty and Europe’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy.
ICSC: central role
The EOSC symposium therefore marked the first official step in the work that will lead to the creation of a European research ecosystem, with the ICSC National Centre at the forefront. Selected as a National Node in February this year, the ICSC, whose participation in the EOSC Federation confirms and reinforces the National Centre’s commitment to promoting the principles of Open Science, will make its computing and Big Data infrastructure available to the project and to all European researchers, together with cutting-edge data analysis tools currently under development.
Confirming the central role played by the ICSC within the EOSC Federation, the National Centre was given ample space during the three-day EOSC Symposium, which was marked by the presentation of the first use cases coordinated by the organisations supporting the Nodes of the first phase of the EOSC Federation. With two use cases presented with the European research infrastructure on biobanks and biomolecular resources BBMRI-ERIC and CERN, ICSC has demonstrated that it can be an important player in the context of European open science and the development of shared solutions for innovative data analysis and management.
Matteo Zanaroli
‘The outcome of the EOSC Symposium has been extremely positive for the ICSC National Centre,’ explains Matteo Zanaroli, Ethics and Data Governance Manager at ICSC and coordinator of the Italian EOSC Node. “Thanks to the exposure and European projection guaranteed by participation in the EOSC initiative, ICSC has established further contacts and collaborations with important European research organisations and infrastructures. With some of these organisations, such as BBMRI-ERIC and CERN, we have developed relevant use cases that were presented and reported as examples of best practice during the symposium, while other prestigious organisations have shown great interest in future collaborations. This interest, following the selection as EOSC National Node, confirms the high value of the skills and resources that the National Centre, directly or through its members, can make available to the scientific community and the importance of the EOSC initiative in strengthening Italian research.
Read the EOSC press release: Welcome to the EOSC Federation: MoU establishes shared path to operations
