FAIR and open data sharing in support of the mission adaptation to climate change

Reuse of research data within and across disciplines and borders require openness, infrastructure capacity, better handling, careful management, machine actionability and seamless access to services all along the data life cycle. The Horizon Europe mission areas recognise upfront that providing access to data, knowledge and digital services through federated infrastructures is a key enabling condition for success. In addition, European Partnerships tackling complex societal challenges through multi-disciplinary approaches are facing important challenges in the European R&I systems, including poor data interoperability. In recent years, different scientific communities have started developing ‘thematic clouds’ or ‘data spaces’ within their domain of research and innovation. The EOSC provides the enabling framework to share, connect and upscale best practices and services by the communities to implement FAIR principles for (open, where possible) data sharing and management. Access to an initial EOSC federation of research infrastructures and their services is being consolidated and concepts such as FAIR data management and FAIR-by-design digital research outputs (data, publications, software, code, protocols, etc.) become more prominent.

The overall objective of this topic is to accelerate research and innovation under the mission climate adaptation through better access, management, interoperability, reuse and citation of digital information, to be achieved by using and integrating EOSC resources ranging from EOSC federated infrastructures, services and data to guidelines, best practices, tools and metrics for the management of FAIR and open data, and to extend these resources to the relevant climate adaptation domains that are less familiar with EOSC.

This should be achieved through cross-domain, strategic use cases of direct relevance to the implementation plan of the mission climate adaptation and its objective to support at least 150 European regions and communities to become climate resilient by 2030.

The use cases should demonstrate the value of sharing FAIR and open research data, help to establish data sharing and management practices within the involved communities and across the Member States, the Associated Countries and their involved regions, leveraging European research infrastructures and e-Infrastructures. The use cases should provide feedback to the EOSC Partnership on the desired future evolution of the EOSC platform. Special attention should be put on aspects of data harmonisation, data quality assurance, integration and validation of data collections and models, data privacy and security, big-data analysis and machine learning methods, as well as on the socio-economic dimension. Proposals should also foster the creation of user environments that researchers in this field can then use to seamlessly interact with digital information in the framework of the EOSC ecosystem.

Proposals should provide for activities to collaborate with relevant European Partnerships. Synergies with Horizon Europe Cluster 5 activities and other relevant initiatives, including actions stemming from Cohesion policy programmes, are welcome. Research and innovation should build on results of Horizon 2020 in the field of climate adaptation and, where relevant, support the Destination Earth initiative. Applicants should consider already established ESFRI research infrastructures and efforts by relevant ESFRI cluster projects (e.g. ENVRI-FAIR).

To ensure complementarity of outcomes, proposals are expected to cooperate and align with activities of the EOSC Partnership and to coordinate with relevant initiatives and projects contributing to the development of EOSC. In particular, areas such as data interoperability, metadata and vocabularies, the use of persistent identifiers or AAI, proposals should coordinate and establish a feedback mechanism with the awarded proposal/s from the topic HORIZON-INFRA-2021-EOSC-01-05 in order to ensure alignment with EOSC policies and to identify common useful tools and resources as well as relevant data repositories that comply with EOSC guidelines.