EOSC: European Open Science Cloud

EOSC

European Open Science Cloud: an EU-led initiative and emerging federation of research data infrastructures intended to provide European researchers with seamless, cross-border, cross-discipline access to data, services, and computational resources under FAIR and open-science principles.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 22 Aug 2026

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EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) is an EU-backed initiative — begun under Horizon 2020 and continued under Horizon Europe — to give European researchers seamless, cross-border, cross-discipline access to research data, services, and computational resources under FAIR and open-science principles. It is a policy and governance framework rather than a single platform: EOSC does not itself own the infrastructure researchers actually use.

Governance

EOSC operates under tripartite governance shared between the EOSC Association — a Belgian non-profit membership association gathering hundreds of research organisations, infrastructures, and national representatives — the European Commission, and EU member states. The Association sets the strategic research and innovation agenda; the Commission and member states fund and align national policy behind it.

The three things EOSC actually delivers

Rather than restate them here, this entry routes to the two components a researcher or research-information specialist is most likely to interact with directly: the EOSC Federation, the architecture that brings existing national and thematic infrastructures together under shared authentication, monitoring, and interoperability requirements without EOSC owning that infrastructure itself; and the EOSC Marketplace, the discovery and access catalogue through which those federated services are actually found and used. A third layer, EOSC Core, provides the shared technical plumbing (AAI, service catalogue, monitoring, helpdesk, persistent identifiers) underneath both.

Why it matters to research administration

Horizon Europe calls increasingly expect or require that data outputs be deposited in an EOSC-onboarded repository, and many pan-European infrastructures (OpenAIRE, EGI, EUDAT, GEANT, PRACE) now present themselves publicly as EOSC services — so a grant office assessing where a Horizon Europe grantee can compliantly deposit data needs to know EOSC as a governance frame, not just as a single search box.

References

European Commission, ‘European Open Science Cloud’ (research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu).
EOSC Association, ‘About EOSC’ (eosc.eu).

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="EOSC"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/eosc" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

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  ],
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  "dateModified": "2026-08-22T19:51:55",
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}