The University of Bologna joins the European Open Science Cloud Association

The University of Bologna joins the European Open Science Cloud Association, thus formally becoming part of the group of stakeholders of European research (institutions providing funding and services, representatives of the research community and intergovernmental organisations) who intend to formalize their role in the EOSC infrastructure.

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is a virtual environment for all researchers to store, manage, analyse and re-use data for research. The EOSC environment is designed to provide innovative services and foster collaboration among different actors for researching effectively and openly following the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) data management at the European level.

With such scopes, EOSC supports the European Community in developing a working plan on Open Science within the Horizon Europe programme. Moreover, the role of EOSC is fundamental to the future strategic partnership regarding the investment policies of Open Science and, more specifically, of free data access.

Among the founding members of EOSC, we also find the Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure (ICDI represented by the GARR Consortium) - the national infrastructure for Open Science that the University of Bologna joined last year.

At the national level, the ICDI is in charge of the Task Force EOSC Competence Centre IT (CCIT) that envisages the creation of an Italian Competence Centre to offer training and informative materials on Open Science and FAIR Data as well as to help the national research community transition to the Open Science paradigm. In this way, the Italian task force will contribute to steering the debate over the EOSC Competence Centre while giving visibility to Italian academia and research.

“Promoting Open Science nationally and internationally is one of the main goals of the University of Bologna” explains Monica Forni, a professor of the Department of Veterinary Medical Sciences and Unibo’s representative in the EOSC as well as in the Task Force EOSC Competence Centre IT (CCIT). “Participating in EOSC will strengthen our collaboration with the main European actors and will contribute to policymaking in the field of Open Science”.