The EOSC 2025 Symposium concluded yesterday, Wednesday, November 5, in Brussels, marking the first step in the operational phase of establishing the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation — a project aimed at creating a unified digital space for sharing data and services to support open science and innovation in Europe. The event gathered 500 participants from over 20 countries, including significant representation from the European Commission and the coordinators of the nodes forming the first phase of the EOSC Federation. Among them was the ICSC – Italian Research Centre on HPC, Big Data and Quantum Computing, which is responsible for the Italian EOSC Node.
This meeting provided an opportunity to discuss the organizational structure, technological solutions, and initial scientific use cases that will define the initiative. The outcome of eight months of intensive work was formalized in the Memorandum of Understanding, signed by Klaus Tochtermann, President of the EOSC Association (EOSC-A), during the symposium’s opening day. The document provides the operational framework for European organizations supporting the EOSC nodes.
Coordinated by the EOSC Association, together with the European Commission, EU Member States, and associated countries, the goal of EOSC is to facilitate access to scientific data and promote European growth through the federation of computing resources, databases, and data management and analysis services. The project aims to create a federated digital infrastructure composed of Nodes, Thematic Nodes, and National Nodes, all built on shared technological paradigms that will enable the implementation of the FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable data) of Open Science, while strengthening European data sovereignty and Europe’s competitiveness in the global knowledge economy.
The EOSC Symposium thus marked the first official step toward creating a European research ecosystem in which the ICSC National Centre plays a leading role. Selected as the National Node in February of this year, the participation of ICSC in the EOSC Federation confirms and reinforces the Centre’s commitment to promoting Open Science principles. ICSC will provide the project and the broader European research community with its computing and Big Data infrastructure, along with cutting-edge data analysis tools currently under development.
Reinforcing the central role of ICSC within the EOSC Federation was also the strong presence of the Centre throughout the three-day event, which featured the presentation of the first use cases coordinated by the organizations supporting the Nodes of the Federation’s initial phase. Through two use cases developed in collaboration with the European research infrastructures BBMRI-ERIC (Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure) and CERN, ICSC demonstrated its capacity to act as a key player in the context of European open science and in developing shared solutions for innovative data management and analysis.
“The outcome of the EOSC Symposium is extremely positive for the ICSC National Centre,” explains Matteo Zanaroli, Ethics and Data Governance Manager at ICSC and coordinator of the Italian EOSC Node. “Thanks to the exposure and European reach gained through participation in the EOSC initiative, ICSC has established new contacts and collaborations with major European research organizations and infrastructures. With some of these, such as BBMRI-ERIC and CERN, we have developed significant use cases that were presented as best-practice examples during the symposium. Other prestigious organizations have expressed strong interest in future collaborations. This interest — following our selection as the Italian EOSC National Node — further confirms the high value of the expertise and resources that the ICSC, directly or through its members, can offer the scientific community, and highlights the importance of the EOSC initiative in strengthening Italian research.”
Read the EOSC press release: “Welcome to the EOSC Federation: MoU”
