Charting the course towards a concrete European Open Science Cloud: outcomes of the EUDAT Conference “Putting the EOSC vision into practice”, Porto, 22-25 January 2018

Panel recommendations:

• EOSC should be mostly about interoperability and integration - Previous investments (existing services) and experiences (competences and use cases) must be leveraged;
• EOSC should not be seen only as a technical problem - EOSC is not expected to be a new platform but a federation of existing services provided by different organisations with different governance and funding mechanisms. EOSC needs to define clear terms of use considering access rights, conditions to access services and business models; 
• EOSC has to be an “affordable”, “inclusive” ecosystem - EOSC aims at taking on board different countries, disciplines and institutions to offer all of them the same conditions to make data driven science. The access conditions need to be affordable from a cost perspective to encourage participation;
• Users must be in the driving seat -  EOSC should allow a smooth onboard of mature communities and should be an essential enabler for new communities;
• Research Infrastructures (RIs) have a double role in EOSC: as users and thematic service providers - It is clear that EOSC is the opportunity for RIs to expand their user base. Multi-disciplinary use cases would be a good instrument to assess the value and the benefits that EOSC can bring to RIs and to attract them;
• Measuring usage of the EOSC services is fundamental to assess impact - A Virtual Access mechanism is already in place. Measuring usage is not only fundamental in terms of impact but also to compensate the service providers. We need to fund services that are used;
• Data quality, trust, and user feedback are still open challenges. 

“From an artistic point of view EOSC is a movie, which is art, but behind there is an industry that has to organize the infrastructure, the governance and the sustainability model.” - Augusto Burgueño Arjona, European Commission