The first attempts to combine the national resources with the European digital research environment. Mechanisms that have proven effective. The best way to manage the entire venture. Over 50 experts representing 13 candidate Nodes of the EOSC Federation and the EOSC EU Node discussed these issues at the meeting held in the National Science Centre. They helped prepare the launch of the EOSC Federation at the EOSC Symposium in November.
EOSC Federation Build-up Group Meeting
The EOSC Federation Build-Up Group met on 17 and 18 June 2025 at the premises pf the National Science Centre in Kraków, Poland to benchmark the progress of work, and to agree on the next steps toward launch of the EOSC Federation.
The meeting began with a welcome from Aneta Pazik-Aybar, Head of the Open Science Team at the National Science Centre, the host of the meeting and the organisation behind the Polish national candidate node, EOSC-PL. The EOSC Association (EOSC-A) Secretary General Ute Gunsenheimer and the EC’s Stefan Liebler (of DG Research and Innovation) also welcomed the participants, and a letter from Volker Beckmann, EOSC Steering Board’s Chair, was read out.
The meeting was attended by representatives of the candidate Nodes of the EOSC Federation: BBMRI ERIC, CERN, CNR (Blue-Cloud 2026), CNRS (Data Terra) – French national Node, CSC-IT Center for Science – Finnish national Node, CVTI SR – Slovakian national Node, Life Science Research Node (on behalf of ELIXIR, EMBL, Euro-BioImaging ERIC, and Instruct-ERIC), ESRF (PaNOSC), EUDAT, Foundation ICSC – Italian national Node, NFDI – German national Node, SURF – Dutch national Node, and EOSC-PL – Polish national Node.
The following institutions will collaborate under the EOSC-PL national Node: the National Science Centre (NCN), Academic Computer Centre Cyfronet AGH, Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw (ICM UW), Gdańsk University of Technology (PG), and Institute of Oceanology, Polish Academy of Sciences. Other participants included representatives of the EOSC EU Node from the European Commission (DG CNECT), Athena RC and Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PCSS).
At the plenary session, the EOSC Node candidates and EOSC EU Node gave an update of the actions completed over the last three months and challenges they faced. The group’s primary objective in developing the Federation’s scientific use cases in time for the EOSC Symposium in early November to demonstrate the added value that the EOSC Federation will bring to European research and researchers. The initiative will also support European researchers by offering a digital environment for conducting research.
An important part of the meeting was the discussion on the results of the first attempt to federate resources with the EOSC EU Node launched by the European Commission last October. The second part of the meeting featured discussions on federating capabilities, resources, governance and use cases. Representatives of the working groups[1] reported and discussed the topics that were formed at the initial stage of Federation’s development. The sub-groups aim to develop common solutions. While usually working online, they had the chance to meet face-to-face in Krakow to determine the next steps.
Cases of Use
A consensus was reached on five scientific use cases suggested by the candidate Nodes that will be presented at the EOSC Symposium:
- Exploring the impact of marine microbiomes on carbon sequestration;
- Cross-node workflows for the analysis of CERN’s ATLAS/CMS experiment’s open data on the REANA reusable data platform and the processing of imaging data from the environmental and life sciences using the Galaxy platform;
- The photon and neutron federated knowledge finder, PaN-Finder, an AI-enabled data search tool to for navigating the large data sets of European Research Infrastructures;
- A prostate cancer screening tool, MCVAL, that employs multi-centric validation of AI models; and
- The use of genomic sequencing analysis to facilitate cross-border surveillance of anti-microbial resistance.
Next in Helsinki
The meeting ended with a discussion on the possible criteria and procedures for enrolling future EOSC Nodes, a process that will be led by the EOSC Tripartite Governance.
The next in-person meeting is planned for Helsinki on 01-02 October 2025.
[1] Examples of working sub-groups: Federated AAI; Service Catalogue; Interoperability and Integration; VRE; Scientific Data Repository Integration, File Sync and Share.