Project Coordinator: Dr. Eng. Adrian Victor VEVERA – Scientific Researcher II

Overall objectives of the project

• supporting the development of national Open Science Cloud initiatives in the 15 EU Member States and partner countries, as well as their inclusion in the governance structure of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC);
• promoting within the community and providing training support for the EOSC and FAIR principles (identification, accessibility, interoperability and reusability of data);
• providing technical assistance and policy support for the connection to the EOSC of generic service providers (calculation, storage and data management), thematic services in various scientific fields, digital publication repositories and research data.

Project description

The NI4OS-Europe project (ni4os.eu) aims to become a key-contributor to EOSC's portfolio of services, to engage in EOSC governance and to ensure inclusion at European level, in order to facilitate Open Science globally.

NI4OS-Europe will ensure the involvement of a network of specialists representing various categories of stakeholders, infrastructure and service providers in the region, to support the implementation of EOSC's vision, architecture and governance.

The project envisages the federalization of relevant EOSC services, existing in the participating countries, which will be offered as EOSC services. To this end, it will collaborate with other EOSC initiatives to contribute to the common EOSC platform, including a set of policies, rules and principles for the management of services and research data in the EOSC ecosystem.

The project consortium includes 22 partners from 15 Southeast European countries: Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Serbia, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Northern Macedonia, Montenegro, Moldova, Armenia and Georgia.

The Romanian participants are ICI Bucharest and UEFSCDI.

Estimated results

Specifically, the project aims to provide the following results:

• 15 national initiatives for Open Science Cloud;
• 20 courts of generic services;
• 20 thematic services;
• 15 digital repositories;
• 5 training events e.g. „training of trainers”;
• 3 scientific fields addressed (biomedicine, climate change, cultural heritage);
• 1 regional event (200 participants);
• 30 training events at national level (total 450 participants);
• 3 sets of guidelines in the field of open research data management (ORDM);
• 6 ORDM instruments;
• 1 pre-production environment compatible with EOSC for the services and digital storage units of the project.

National End-Users Training

On March 29, 2022, the National Institute for Research & Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest and UEFISCDI, Romanian partners in the Horizon 2020 project NI4OS Europe - National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe, jointly organized the National End-Users Training as a part of the user engagement action plan of the project. The event agenda included the following topics: Research Data Management Plan, Research Data FAIRification, Open Licensing, Incentives and rewards for supporting Open and FAIR Research Data, End-user facilities of the EOSC Portal for accessing EOSC services and resources. All presentations are available in Romanian on the training platform of the project at National End-Users Training in Romania.

CALL FOR PROPOSALS FOR ACCESSING NI4OS-EUROPE SERVICES

The Horizon 2020 project NI4OS-Europe launched on April 11, 2022, an open call for projects offering researchers from EU member states and associated countries the opportunity to access a wide range of generic and thematic services, as well as repositories that have benefited from the support of this project to be onboarded to EOSC (European Open Science Cloud). The thematic services mainly target the scientific communities in the fields of Life Sciences, Climatology, Digital Cultural Heritage and Computational Physics. Generic services refer to the provision of Compute resources (HPC and Cloud), Storage and Data services. Repositories provide access to datasets, software, and scientific manuscripts. The list of these services and resources is available in the NI4OS-Europe catalog.

Access to computational (generic) resources can be awarded for a maximum period of 6 months, while access to storage resources may be provided for up to 8 months. 80% of the projects participating in the call would belong to the scientific communities mentioned above, while the other 20% may target other scientific domains.

The closing date of the call is May 11, 2022. Details of this call are available at: Call for Proposals for Accessing Ni4os-Europe Services.

EOSC REGIONAL EVENT

Between September 28-29, 2022, in the capital of Hungary, Budapest University of Technology and Economics will host the EOSC Regional Event, which aims to disseminate the results obtained by NI4OS Europe so far and how it managed to determine the progress of the European Open Science Cloud Initiatives. The event is aimed at academia, infrastructure specialists, service providers and open science decision-makers.

Official website of the conference: https://ni4os.eu/eosc-regional-event-in-budapest/

Facebook Event: https://fb.me/e/2NgSYPiHh

Direct registration link: https://events.ni4os.eu/event/74/

NI4OS-EUROPE DISSEMINATION EVENT

On October 27, 2022, National Institute for Research - Development in Informatics - ICI Bucharest and UEFISCDI - the Romanian partners in Horizon 2020 NI4OS-Europe - National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe organized the 2nd event on dissemination of project results, according to the action plan. The agenda included the presentation of the RO-NOSCI initiative (Romanian – National Open Science Cloud Initiative), technical support for administration, main content and methods of access to the NI4OS-Europe Catalog of Generic and Thematic Services, as well as the developments of the European Open Science Cloud.

The presentations given during the event can be accessed here.