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.”

20 October is European Statistics Day. The theme of this year’s initiative is ‘Better Data – Better Lives.’ Statistics Day is organised by the European Statistical Advisory Committee (ESAC) and the European System of Central Banks. A conference of European Statistics Stakeholders organised by Eurostat, the European Central Bank and the ESAC takes place in Budapest on 20 and 21 October. The EUI Library will be represented.

The BigDataEurope consortium has launched a Big Data Aggregator Platform to provide access to, and tools for, “multilingual data harvesting, data analytics, and data visualisation.” BigDataEurope is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and science funding initiative, and is composed of stakeholders from seven societal research clusters: health; food; energy; transport; climate; social sciences and security. Services include data storage, processing, analysis and publishing. The portal launch press release is available in English and German.

On 27 May EU ministers of science, innovation and industry agreed to support “a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020.” Conclusions of the meeting – which took place in the context of the EU Competitiveness Council – were published as The Transition Towards an Open Science System on 27 May. At a press conference following the meeting, Carlos Moedas, Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation said the result of the meeting was an “amazing achievement” by the Dutch Presidency of the Council which agreed “to further promote the mainstreaming of open access to scientific publications by continuing to support a transition to immediate open access as the default by 2020, using the various models possible and in a cost-effective way, without embargoes or with as short as possible embargoes, and without financial and legal barriers.” [Full text]

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.