Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EOSC-Nordic (EOSC-Nordic) Reporting period: 2021-03-01 to 2022-11-30 Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project EOSC-Nordic is the result of a Nordic-Baltic collaboration between 24 partner institutions, bridging e-Infrastructure providers, research communities, archive holders, ministries, funding agencies, as well as national, European, and international Open Science experts, etc., in one big and pan-European collaboration!The EOSC-Nordic project facilitated a regional coordination of EOSC relevant initiatives within the Nordic and Baltic countries. The project exploited synergies achieving greater harmonisation at policy and service provisioning across these countries, in compliance with EOSC agreed standards and practices.The EOSC-Nordic project fostered and advanced the take-up of the European Open Science Cloud in the Nordic & Baltic region through the coordinating the EOSC relevant initiatives taking place in Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia.EOSC implementation relies both on the EC funding projects and in-kind contributions of organisations. In order to be successful these two parties need to work in sync, avoiding duplication of effort and divergent routes. EOSC-Nordic has been a pioneer in approaching the Grant Agreement activities within a bigger picture, the picture of the EOSC co-programmed partnership. All the Nordic and Baltic countries have committed to the ERA action number 1; thanks to the SRIA there is a common EOSC vision and strategic roadmap. The EOSC Association is setting up mechanisms for facilitating and making more impactful work of the projects, at regional level we will maintain the community, supported by the NeiC affiliate programme. Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far With a budget of 6 million euros, the EOSC-Nordic project aimed to establish the Nordic and Baltic countries as frontrunners in the take-up of the EOSC concept, principles, and approach. In order to achieve the objectives set out for EOSC-Nordic, the project focused on the following areas:Development and adoption of EOSC-compliant services in collaboration with well-established research communities and integration of Nordic services and resources into EOSC;Promotion of FAIR principles and practices in the Nordic region and creation of related competences;Promotion of EOSC in the region at community and policy level and mobilisation of Nordic and Baltic policy makers to pursue alignment around EOSC in the region.The activities performed by the 24 partners in the 39 months covered by the project allowed to generate over twenty key exploitable results that have contributed or will contribute to the EOSC advancement and uptake in the region and at European level. Thanks to the competences of the partners and the possibility to leverage the long lasting Nordic collaboration, (the project released KERs in the following five categories:-New and/or enhanced services and tools;-Increased FAIR uptake and skills in the region;-Proof of concepts;-Increased EOSC alignment and coordination in the region;-Direct contribution to the EOSC co-programmed partnership. These results generated the following impact in the region and on EOSC as a whole:-Establishment of a regional hub for consuming Nordic and Baltic services and onboarding them in the EOSC marketplace-Development of tools used by Nordic research communities-Increased FAIR skills and uptake in the region-Increased Open Science and EOSC awareness in the region-Consolidation of the collaboration among the Nordic and Baltic countries-Contribution to the evolution and testing of the EOSC Marketplace and to the entire EOSC Co-programmed partnership-Contribution to the development of FAIR tools-Enhancement of services and tools that can be used by research communities beyond the Nordics. Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far) Establishment of a regional hub for consuming Nordic and Baltic services and onboarding them in the EOSC marketplaceThe pre-onboarding platform provides a regional hub for consuming Nordic and Baltic services and a tool for Nordic and Baltic providers for publishing services and resources in the EOSC marketplace in an easy way. This effort also created knowledge in the region on how to onboard services in the EOSC Marketplace and raised awareness of the current challenges, first of all the lack of a strong value proposition to motivate providers to onboard services in the Marketplace and the lack of a business model supporting the consumption of Nordic resources at European level.Creation of an easy-to-use evaluation model for assessing maturity of the services and their compliances with the current rules of onboarding in the EOSC Marketplace.The interoperability guidelines developed in the project helped the consolidation of interoperability principles within the region. Development of tools used by Nordic research communitiesThe Nordic Language Processing Laboratory community now has a reproducible environment within which they can perform their research. It is possible for researchers to share their easyBuild configuration to allow colleagues to reproduce and build upon their work.Agreement on the schema for the JSON web token for sensitive data has enabled cross-border access to sensitive data in the Nordics possible.The Biodiversity and Climate communities in the Nordics and Baltics have now access to the Galaxy portal for creating reproducible data analysis chains allowing data located in different countries (e.g. data stored in Sweden, Norway and Finland) to be analysed on Cloud platforms in Norway, Sweden and Finland easily; Increased FAIR skills and uptake in the regionThe project has been able to upskill Nordic and Baltic repositories through the support program and the training material produced can be used in the future by other repositories+700 data Stewards trained in the region98 repositories assessed against FAIR, supported repositories increased their FAIR score significantly Six repositories from the Nordic and Baltic countries, thanks to the support provided by the project, have submitted or will submit a certification application for the CoreTrustSeal Increased Open Science and EOSC awareness in the regionThe EOSC-Nordic Knowledge Hub and the website provides a window into the EOSC-Nordic project and its resultsThe deliverable D2.8 on Open Science mapping is a reference point for all the stakeholders in the region to understand the status of Open Science in the region. Thanks to the collaboration with the EOSC Association, the information on status of the policies in the different countries is now also available and maintained through the EOSC Mandate Organisations and EOSC national structures on the eosc.eu website.Deliverable D2.6 is a good source of information for the region to better understand the funding and procurement models behind existing cross-border collaboration models in place in the Nordic countries and the potential challenges that EOSC has in terms of funding and procurement model Consolidation of the collaboration among the Nordic and Baltic countriesStrengthen collaboration and improved alignment among Baltic and Nordic countries when it comes to Open Science and EOSC. At the end of the project:all the Nordic and Baltic countries support the ERA policy action number 1all the Nordic and Baltic countries have in place (or will have soon) Mandated Organisations and EOSC national structures and the project has consolidated contacts and collaborations among them in the region.
