Periodic Reporting for period 1 - EOSC Beyond (EOSC Beyond: advancing innovation and collaboration for research)
Période du rapport: 2024-04-01 au 2025-09-30
EOSC Beyond is a European initiative designed to advance the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) into a more open, interoperable, and sustainable digital ecosystem for research. The project responds to the growing need for researchers, institutions, and scientific communities to access, combine, and reuse data and services across national and disciplinary boundaries. In Europe, research outputs remain fragmented across infrastructures and domains, limiting the ability to conduct multidisciplinary science and slowing down innovation. EOSC Beyond addresses this challenge by developing the next generation of EOSC Core capabilities and by establishing a federated model of autonomous EOSC Nodes that can collaborate while keeping their own identity and resources.
The project aims to make research data and services easier to discover, integrate and use by introducing standardised interoperability mechanisms, reusable software components, and automated deployment tools. It also provides a comprehensive innovation and testing environment, allowing providers and communities to experiment with new solutions before their adoption in the operational EOSC ecosystem. By doing so, EOSC Beyond contributes to the broader European policy objectives on Open Science, FAIR data, digital transformation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Its expected impact is significant in scale, enabling millions of European researchers to benefit from improved access to high-quality, trustworthy, and reusable digital research resources.
The project aims to make research data and services easier to discover, integrate and use by introducing standardised interoperability mechanisms, reusable software components, and automated deployment tools. It also provides a comprehensive innovation and testing environment, allowing providers and communities to experiment with new solutions before their adoption in the operational EOSC ecosystem. By doing so, EOSC Beyond contributes to the broader European policy objectives on Open Science, FAIR data, digital transformation, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Its expected impact is significant in scale, enabling millions of European researchers to benefit from improved access to high-quality, trustworthy, and reusable digital research resources.
EOSC Beyond delivered major advances in the architecture, services, and tools that will underpin the next generation of EOSC. A new federated EOSC architecture was defined, supporting a transition from a centralized model to a distributed network of autonomous yet interoperable Nodes. This architectural work, including the concepts of Federating Capabilities and Node Architecture, is now guiding the establishment of the EOSC Federation.
Ten Pilot Nodes — representing research infrastructures, national initiatives, and thematic communities — were enrolled and validated with the establishment and testing of real scientific scenarios, demonstrating cross-node workflows, shared authentication, resource discovery, and federated data access.
Existing EOSC Core services (AAI, catalogues, monitoring, accounting, PID services, order management, helpdesk and metadata services) were significantly enhanced. The outcome is that these services can now be adopted either as centrally managed offerings or deployed locally by Nodes as white-label services, providing flexible reference implementations for new EOSC Nodes.
Three new EOSC Core capabilities were released:
- The EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox, the Federator Test Node, which is a pre-production environment used by Nodes and providers to test integrations and validate interoperability.
- The EOSC Integration Suite, offering reusable software adapters that simplify the integration of services, data sources, and tools into EOSC. Fifteen adapters were released and already adopted by Pilot Nodes.
- The EOSC Execution Framework, enabling the automated composition and deployment of services and data analysis environments across multiple cloud platforms, using machine-actionable templates through the Interoperability Framework.
The project also initiated an interoperability roadmap between EOSC and SIMPL, focusing on AAI and data transfer, laying the foundation for future cooperation between EOSC and sectoral data spaces.
Ten Pilot Nodes — representing research infrastructures, national initiatives, and thematic communities — were enrolled and validated with the establishment and testing of real scientific scenarios, demonstrating cross-node workflows, shared authentication, resource discovery, and federated data access.
Existing EOSC Core services (AAI, catalogues, monitoring, accounting, PID services, order management, helpdesk and metadata services) were significantly enhanced. The outcome is that these services can now be adopted either as centrally managed offerings or deployed locally by Nodes as white-label services, providing flexible reference implementations for new EOSC Nodes.
Three new EOSC Core capabilities were released:
- The EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox, the Federator Test Node, which is a pre-production environment used by Nodes and providers to test integrations and validate interoperability.
- The EOSC Integration Suite, offering reusable software adapters that simplify the integration of services, data sources, and tools into EOSC. Fifteen adapters were released and already adopted by Pilot Nodes.
- The EOSC Execution Framework, enabling the automated composition and deployment of services and data analysis environments across multiple cloud platforms, using machine-actionable templates through the Interoperability Framework.
The project also initiated an interoperability roadmap between EOSC and SIMPL, focusing on AAI and data transfer, laying the foundation for future cooperation between EOSC and sectoral data spaces.
EOSC Beyond delivers innovations that significantly advance the state of the art in federated research infrastructures, positioning EOSC as a key enabler for FAIR and Open Science.
The new federated EOSC architecture establishes a foundation for a scalable, decentralised research ecosystem, describing how EOSC Nodes can jointly support multidisciplinary use cases through a common set of Federating Capabilities. This represents a step change compared to the previous generation of EOSC, enabling more autonomous, composable and adaptable infrastructures. A key enabler of this evolution is the introduction of the EOSC Node Registry, which provides an authoritative, machine-readable description of each Node and its capabilities. This component underpins the transition toward a mesh-like federation model.
EOSC Beyond also delivers a new generation of the Federated Catalogue, supporting distributed search across Nodes instead of relying on a single central catalogue. By combining Node Registry information with the enhanced Service Catalogue, users can discover services and resources across multiple Nodes.
The Integration Suite introduces a novel approach to simplifying service integration through reusable, community-driven adapters that reduce integration effort for providers and accelerate the time-to-product for scientific applications.
The Execution Framework brings automated deployment and workflow orchestration to EOSC for the first time. Its TOSCA-based deployment service supports multi-cloud environments, data staging from DOI-linked datasets and reproducible computational setups — capabilities essential for modern, data-intensive scientific workflows.
The Innovation Sandbox acts as a unique European testbed for the development of interoperable services and Nodes, allowing experimentation under real federation conditions without impacting production environments.
These developments position EOSC Beyond to drive a new generation of FAIR, interoperable, and reusable digital research services. For full uptake, further work will be needed on sustainability, community-led adoption, standardisation, and the evolution of governance and service management processes.
The new federated EOSC architecture establishes a foundation for a scalable, decentralised research ecosystem, describing how EOSC Nodes can jointly support multidisciplinary use cases through a common set of Federating Capabilities. This represents a step change compared to the previous generation of EOSC, enabling more autonomous, composable and adaptable infrastructures. A key enabler of this evolution is the introduction of the EOSC Node Registry, which provides an authoritative, machine-readable description of each Node and its capabilities. This component underpins the transition toward a mesh-like federation model.
EOSC Beyond also delivers a new generation of the Federated Catalogue, supporting distributed search across Nodes instead of relying on a single central catalogue. By combining Node Registry information with the enhanced Service Catalogue, users can discover services and resources across multiple Nodes.
The Integration Suite introduces a novel approach to simplifying service integration through reusable, community-driven adapters that reduce integration effort for providers and accelerate the time-to-product for scientific applications.
The Execution Framework brings automated deployment and workflow orchestration to EOSC for the first time. Its TOSCA-based deployment service supports multi-cloud environments, data staging from DOI-linked datasets and reproducible computational setups — capabilities essential for modern, data-intensive scientific workflows.
The Innovation Sandbox acts as a unique European testbed for the development of interoperable services and Nodes, allowing experimentation under real federation conditions without impacting production environments.
These developments position EOSC Beyond to drive a new generation of FAIR, interoperable, and reusable digital research services. For full uptake, further work will be needed on sustainability, community-led adoption, standardisation, and the evolution of governance and service management processes.