Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FAIRCORE4EOSC (Core Components Supporting a FAIR EOSC)
Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2023-05-31
FAIRCORE4EOSC is one the first projects funded from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme to contribute to the European Partnership on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The EOSC Partnership will enable by 2030 a trusted, virtual, federated environment in Europe to store, share and re-use research data across borders and scientific disciplines. By developing a 'Web of FAIR Data and Services’ for science in Europe, EOSC aims to give the European Union a global lead in research data management and ensure that European scientists can reap the full benefits of data-driven science.
FAIRCORE4EOSC project contributes to the EOSC by developing nine new components to enrich the EOSC-Core. These new components will significantly improve the discoverability and interoperability of an increased amount of research outputs and support the Partnership in deploying a European Research Data Commons where data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR). More specifically, the new components will improve the way of interlinking research entities across domains and data sources on the basis of Persistent Identifiers, ensure the long-term preservation of research software, support for sharing and access to metadata schemas and crosswalks, and offer advanced research-intent driven discovery services over all EOSC repositories. This is the story behind the project acronym “FAIR”, “CORE”, “4” (as of for), and “EOSC”.
FAIRCORE4EOSC project contributes to the EOSC by developing nine new components to enrich the EOSC-Core. These new components will significantly improve the discoverability and interoperability of an increased amount of research outputs and support the Partnership in deploying a European Research Data Commons where data are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable (FAIR). More specifically, the new components will improve the way of interlinking research entities across domains and data sources on the basis of Persistent Identifiers, ensure the long-term preservation of research software, support for sharing and access to metadata schemas and crosswalks, and offer advanced research-intent driven discovery services over all EOSC repositories. This is the story behind the project acronym “FAIR”, “CORE”, “4” (as of for), and “EOSC”.
The first year of FAIRCORE4EOSC has been characterised by preparing the ground for and kick-starting the development of the new EOSC-Core components. The project has engaged the five user-centric case studies that represent the scientific disciplines of mathematics, social sciences & humanities, and climate change research as well as research data management and service provider communities in collecting user requirements to ensure that the development and testing of the new components are driven by users´ needs. Also external communities have been engaged in the co-design. The primary concrete output of the first year is the initial set of the technical specifications of the new EOSC-Core components, delivered in deliverable D1.2 FAIRCORE4EOSC Technical Specifications (https://zenodo.org/record/7892322). In addition to this, the second main achievement of the period has been the production of the Compliance Assessment Specification that outlines a set of standards, API specifications, and vocabularies that define the nature and capabilities of compliance assessment, encoding, and verification services and infrastructure.
All components developed by the project aim to increase the findability and interoperability of research outputs, which will save researchers a lot of time and effort in finding, accessing, understanding and using data for their research. As a result, they can make better use of their time and focus on the scientific content. A FAIR EOSC and an increasing number of researchers devoted to the Open Science practice of sharing research data will support cross-disciplinary research, leading up to novel openings in science and new innovations. When the data behind scientific results becomes more FAIR, the reproducibility of the results improves, which in turn strengthens the reliability of results and trust in science, hopefully bringing a greater role for science in decision making. All components are under development and they have different Technolofy Readiness Levels (TRLs) at the moment due to the different starting points. The Beta releases of all the components are expected in November 2023.