The EU is ideally positioned to take a global leadership role in the development of a cloud environment for science. The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will be the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.
Europe has long promoted the sharing of scientific research data, which should be remembered as an investment on which national governments and the European Community are spending substantial resources, in the order of billions of euros.
But how can we fully exploit the information and hidden value contained in data so that companies and researchers can create innovation?
To answer this question, Europe is investing in the construction of a European cloud: the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). EOSC will provide the virtual environment where multidisciplinary data, access infrastructures, and computing resources are made available to researchers and private-sector actors.
The challenges involved in this effort are many and go far beyond the technical dimension. Governance, shared objectives, and community building currently appear to be the crucial aspects of an initiative that is too big to fail, and in which the Commission invested 250 million euros through research projects in the 2018-2020 period alone.