The European Open Science Cloud Portal was launched on 23 November 2018. The new EOSC Portal facilitates discovery of data and resources; processing and analysis; research data management; computation; storage; networking; training and security. To mark the launch of the EOSC Portal, the European Commission issued two supporting documents: Prompting EOSC in Practice which explains the governance of the new ecosystem, and; Turning FAIR into Reality which provides an overview of requirements to fulfill the goal of making research data ‘Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.’ EOSC has six components…

The European Commission published a new Recommendation on Access to, and Preservation of, Scientific Information on 25 April, to promote the transition to open science in the European Union. The recommendation provides guidance on incentives for openness; research data management; text and data mining; and technical standards for the re-use of research content. The European Commission published a roadmap for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) 14 March 2018. The EOSC is a “pan-European federation of research data infrastructures, with a view to moving from the current fragmentation, to a situation where data is easy to store, find, share and re-use.”

At an EU Open Science Conference on 4 April, the EC Directorate-General for Research and Innovation announced the setting up of a new Open Science Policy Platform. The composition of the high-level advisory group will be announced in May. The purpose of the group is to advise the EC on how to formulate and implement open science policy in the European Union. Details of the Amsterdam conference are at this link. Supporting documentation on EU open science strategy is on this DG Research and Innovation page. In February 2016, the European Commission also published a report on Validation of the Results of the Public Consultation on Science 2.0: Science in Transition.

The EC’s science-for-policy Joint Research Centre launched a beta JRC Data Catalogue on 15 March. The data catalogue constitutes a growing inventory of data generated by the JRC and scientific partners. The JRC is the EC’s science service “which employs scientists to carry out research in order to provide independent scientific advice and support to EU policy.” JRC Data Catalogue metadata is gradually becoming inter-operable with the recently-launched European Data Portal which provides access to 415,000 datasets harvested from 70 data catalogues in 34 European countries. See also this EUI Library blog post. Information about the beta JRC Data Catalogue has been appended to the EUI Library’s European Data Portal resource page. For access to other data resources at the EUI, please visit the Library Data Portal.

Following four months of beta testing, the European Commision launched the European Data Portal on 17 February. The new Portal provides access to 415,000 datasets harvested from 70 data catalogues in 34 countries (28 European Union member states, the EEA, Switzerland and countries in the EU Neighbourhood Policy programme). Data is sourced from national, regional, local or domain-specific public data providers. The Eurovoc Thesaurus allows multilingual searching by data category. Online training materials are provided – with detailed information on data access, sharing and ownership. The portal provides an advanced search function for the discovery of public open data by geographical location. Full details of access to data at the EUI are on this Library page.

Investing in Europe a six-year growth programme, was launched by EC President Juncker at the European Parliament on 26 November. EU budget and European Investment Bank funds will be used to create a new European Fund for Strategic Investments in business loans and infrastructure projects, to be selected by an independent Investment Committee. The timetable for the establishment of the Fund is June 2015. President Juncker described the initiative as “an investment offensive that optimises our economic policy. We are focusing on long-term, large-scale European investment to create jobs. We are also targeting SMEs – Europe’s job creators – to give a boost to the real economy.” Full text.