The EU-funded EOSC-ENTRUST project launches today, 1 March 2024, with the aim of enhancing European interoperability for sensitive data access and analysis. Led by ELIXIR and the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI), the project brings together partners from 15 European countries and will run for three years, with an EU contribution of €4.2M.
EOSC-ENTRUST will build a European network of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) for sensitive data and develop a common blueprint, or reference architecture, for federated data access and analysis. TREs provide secure platforms for handling sensitive datasets, enabling data privacy and legal compliance in research involving confidential information.
Europe's landscape of TREs is currently fragmented, presenting challenges in access and management for researchers and providers. The variety of systems and procedures complicates research efforts, and there is a pressing need for a unified approach to managing federated access across differing technologies and governance frameworks.
EOSC-ENTRUST brings together providers of operational TREs from 15 European countries with a shared goal to implement, validate and promote their capabilities through a common European framework using shared standards and common legal, operational and technical language.
The project will create a reference architecture for interoperability, based on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Interoperability Framework, to address legal, organisational, technical and semantic interoperability aspects. It includes driver projects in genomics, clinical trials, social science, and public-private partnerships to test and refine this blueprint and facilitate secure data analysis through federated workflows.
Targeted outreach activities will expand the provider network and develop policy papers and guidelines to create a long-term operational TRE framework within EOSC. EOSC-ENTRUST will work closely with the SIESTA and TITAN projects, funded in the same call, to provide trusted environments for sensitive data management in EOSC.
Peter Maccallum, ELIXIR’s Chief Technical Officer and Coordinator of EOSC-ENTRUST, said
“We are delighted to launch the EOSC-ENTRUST project, and look forward to working with Europe’s TRE providers and wider sensitive data community to produce an interoperability blueprint to enable biomolecular and biomedical research involving sensitive data”.
Yann Le Franc, head of the EUDAT secretariat, said
“EOSC-ENTRUST brings together two major data centric infrastructures,EUDAT and ELIXIR. With our experience and international networks, we will address the growing multidisciplinary demand for secure digital environments by orchestrating European-wide coordination and interfaces with other EU organisations and initiatives like EOSC and the European Data Spaces”.