Remarks from the EOSC Stakeholder Forum´s Governance panel

21 November 2018 | 13:30 – 14:30

Austria Center, Vienna

Check out the Governance Session slides from the #EOSCStakeholdersForum. With the launch of the governance structure, the right coordination and management of #EOSC initiatives will be the focus for 2019. Check out the slides here: https://t.co/LoW3QcxUGK pic.twitter.com/n5brcJrAvt

— EOSCpilot.eu (@eoscpilot) 22 January 2019

Governance within EOSC needs to be carefully thought of, and there are multiple examples of local experiences that should be taken into account stated Dr. Per Öster, director at CSC, lead of the Governance work in EOSCpilot. He chaired the panel to discuss the future of EOSC Governance in the Stakeholder´s Forum 21st November. “EOSC governance will have implications for the whole European research, whether we succeed or fail. Therefore, governance is important!”

The panelists involved in the session have extensive experience and were representing considerations from various fields of stakeholders.

Matthew Dovey, Head of e-Infrastructure Strategy at JISC, has drafted a vision for EOSCpilot project how the EOSCpilot Governance Framework looks forward to how the governance needs to involve after the implementation period post 2020. It is a living document where everybody who wants can comment in the Github when the deliverable is published. (See figure below)

Marie Timmermann is a Senior Policy Officer at Science Europe addressing research funders and research performing organisations, responsible for various aspects of the Open Science agenda, research data and EU legislation. Timmermann pointed out that it is also crucial to make the business model clearer. There should be discussion about the EOSC post-2020 financing model already now.

Some recommendations within the 2nd EOSC HLEG report have been considered already on post 2020 financing model.

Dr. Tiina Kupila-Rantala, Deputy Managing Director at CSC, is responsible for EOSC hub strategy work. Tiina wanted to emphasize the stakeholder side. “Not only the bodies in the model are important but also the processes, workflows between the bodies are of crucial importance. Processes and workflows are actually more important than the bodies and therefore the processes should be defined well. She underlined “not to draw too tiny lines, because there are actually more important than the boxes”.

Trust-IT Services CEO and 2nd EOSC High-Level Expert Group Chair Silvana Muscella, together with the other HLEG experts have finalized the final report published and launched at the EOSC launch during the Austrian Presidency of the Council of the European Commission on Friday 23rd November. According to her it is important to analyze who are the actual stakeholders and what is their role. A user-centered approach is a key for EOSC to succeed, organically approached, together with the element of access to reputable and trusted data through peer review.

An overview on responding to having a Minimum Viable Ecosystem (MVE) for EOSC is the right approach to take. Planning an MVE includes: Identifying & understanding the Business needs; Finding the opportunities which includes; Identification of users, their actions & desired results as well as identification of pains & gains of each action. The following user’s input may be taken into consideration from the user analysis divided into:

• European Researchers

• Software Developers

• Infrastructure Providers

• Research Funding organisations

Matthew Dovey commented that the structure of the ‘Executive’ group reflects the ‘Stakeholders’ group as the executive body is implementing the decisions made by the stakeholders. Openness is the key in the model, there shouldn’t be a closed community. Stakeholders need a wider role.

The audience also posed quite a few questions and comments. There was significant discussion regarding universities and researchers’ role in EOSC.  The president of Eurodoc, Gareth O’Neil and Lidia Borrell-Damian, director of Research & Innovation at the European University Association suggests EOSC is not well enough known among researchers so getting the universities and institutes involved, on a much higher level was considered important.

Per Öster pointed out it is important to involve the researchers already in the building and shaping of the EOSC governance. During the current project, efforts have been made to reach out to researchers in order to get feedback on EOSC and governance model.

Also EuroHPC was considered a relevant avenue of synergy to engage with where some needs could be capitalized on related to EOSC, an idea of having an HPC Working Group could be considered as well.   The HPC does have its own very unique mechanisms so this may not necessarily be vital but a more articulated synergy going forward to help build the EOSC in Practice stories could be considered.

Discussing the Working Groups, again an overview of some potential WGs with the highest priority for the 1st implementation phase were provided by Silvana Muscella and they are listed below, (*) the Star WGs have been included in line with Open Consultation Feedback from the EOSC Community Summer 2018, published on the EOSCpilot project website:

• The Rules of Participation WG

• Reference Architecture WG

• Open Standards in Service Development and Seamless deployment WG*

• Resource Allocation WG

• Governance & Legal Structure

• Incentives & Business Models WG

• FAIR Principles over Data & Services WG

• Global Scientific Research WG*

• Data Management Policies WG

• Quality Management of Data WG *

• Data Security & Compliance WG

• Monitoring & Indicators WG *

The main message of the panel seemed to be the importance of the stakeholder engagement. Research infrastructures should be strongly involved and easily connected to universities. The earlier the researchers are taken in the building and shaping the EOSC the better. Research Infrastructures, ESFRIs, ERICs are expected to play a central role in EOSC where cross-use of Research Infrastructures best practices is demonstrated - an outcome to be closely monitored by Funding Agencies

Business plans are crucial and the funding after 2020 should be taken into consideration already now.

Flexible business models and rewarding schemes, to be field-validated should be introduced. Some ideas of different business models from the 2nd HLEG report are laid out below:

• • Direct Support Model

    • an institute receives a grant from a funding entity to build/operate the resource and make it available to other grantees of the funding entity

    • Ability of certain researchers to access these resources may be restricted (i.e. non-grantees of the funding entity cannot access to the resource)

  • Cloud Coin Model

    • Based on a certification programme for commercial & non-commercial provider of scientifically useful services

    • Accept specific EOSC-defined financial transactions in payments (“cloud-coins”)

  • Hybrid Model

    • Combination of Direct support Model & Cloud Coin Model.

LINKS:

GOVERNANCE SESSION SLIDES: https://www.eoscpilot.eu/content/governance#overlay-context=taxonomy/ter...

All the sessions pages and the whole programme for  EOSC STAKEHOLDER FORUM can be found at this link: https://eoscpilot.eu/stakeholders-forum/2018-edition/second-eoscpilot-st...