How to Become an EOSC Provider - An Overview

Who Can Become an EOSC Provider? What are the EOSC Rules of Participation?

EOSC Resource Providers provide many kinds of resources – services, data sources, and research products such as actual data, publications, software, etc.  EOSC Resource Providers are part of the “EOSC Exchange” illustrated in the blue section of the architecture diagram below. 

The EOSC architecture has four main parts: 

  1. EOSC Exchange (blue) includes services and data sources onboarded to EOSC by research infrastructures, clusters and projects, serving the needs of one or more research communities as well as the general public and private sector. 
  2. EOSC Core (green) contains enabling services required to operate the EOSC and the coordination functions.
  3. EOSC Interoperability Framework (grey) identifies standards and guidelines that each service can and should comply with to increase the ability of users to connect services into more powerful and useful combinations.
  4. EOSC Support activities (orange) complement the other services and include services such as training and the Digital Innovation Hub. 

The architecture diagram below illustrates these four (4) parts.

EOSC strives to provide researchers with a wide range of high-quality, interoperable research services, tools and data that will improve researchers’ productivity and enable excellent research. The EOSC Rules of Participation were developed to provide general guidance about how to achieve these objectives.

The EOSC Future project, building on work and practises from predecessor projects (including EOSC Hub, EOSC Enhance, OpenAIRE), has translated the general guidance of the Rules of Participation into specific criteria to be used with Providers (referred to as ‘you’ and ‘your’ in the points below) :

Legal accountability

Legally accountable for the operation of the service or the supply of the research asset.  Your organisation must either be a legal entity itself or must identify a legal entity of which you are a part or with which you are affiliated, which entity will take legal responsibility for the resources being onboarded to EOSC.  If your organisation is not a legal entity itself, the (separate) legal entity you identify is called the ‘hosting legal entity’ and must first be onboarded as an EOSC Provider in its own right before you or your resources can themselves be onboarded.

  • For federated or jointly provided resources, the resource onboarding must be done by the coordinating or lead provider (i.e. the coordinating or lead provider is the ‘Resource organisation’ in the resource profile). Other providers must also onboard as EOSC Resource Providers and should be added as supporting or supplementary providers (i.e. other providers would be listed in the ‘Resource providers’ field in the resource profile).
 

 

Targeting service(s)

Targeting service(s)  and research products for EOSC users or integrat ing services with EOSC-Core capabilities.  You aim to onboard resources to EOSC Exchange that target EOSC and EOSC communities, or are built on or leverage EOSC capabilities to serve another community outside of EOSC.

Service delivery

Committed to effective service delivery.  You will ensure that the resources you and your collaborators offer will be effectively delivered.

Provide accurate information in English and keep it up to date

Prepared to provide accurate information in English and keep it up to date. You agree to fully describe yourself and your resources in English, using the required forms and interfaces, and to keep this information up to date, particularly contact information and web links (URLs) through regular updates. This includes removing services that are no longer operational or available.

Provide service to EOSC users at least in English

Able to provide service to EOSC users at least in English. Service interfaces, documentation, instructions, technical support, helpdesk interactions, etc., must be supported at least in English.

The EOSC Onboarding Process

The EOSC Onboarding Process has been designed to ensure that resources provided through the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace offer the level of quality and interoperability that make them valuable to researchers.  This process is performed by the EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT).  What is the EOSC Portal Onboarding Team?”

There are two distinct paths for onboarding resources to the EOSC Catalogue:

  1. Single Providers registering and onboarding instances of services, data sources, research products, and/or training resources.

  2. A 'Catalogue Owner Representative' onboards a single Catalogue (i.e. a collection of resources). After the Catalogue is approved, multiple providers and services, data sources, research products, and training resources can be onboarded by the Catalogue Owner Representative by using the appropriate API for each resource type.

Who can Onboard Providers and Resources?

Onboarding should be performed by an appropriate representative of each Provider, referred to as the “Provider’s Representative”, who is authorised to provide correct information about the Provider and the Resources that are being onboarded.  

During the Onboarding process, the Provider’s Representative will need to supply contact details for both a technical contact and an administrative contact.  Most Provider’s Representatives list themselves as the Technical Contact for the Provider and identify someone from the Provider organisation’s management team as the Administrative Contact.

The Provider’s Representative will need to log in to the EOSC Service Providers Dashboard or the EOSC Research Product Providers Dashboard using login credentials accepted by the EOSC’s federated Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI) mechanisms .

The Provider’s Representative will be asked to confirm their authorisation to represent the Provider by agreeing to the following notice:

What is the Service Providers Dashboard?

The Service Providers Dashboard is a web interface that is part of the EOSC Resource Catalogue, which enables providers to register to the EOSC to become eligible to onboard services, data sources and catalogues into the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, view the list of resources they have registered in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, and perform actions such as activate/deactivate resources and view usage statistics.

What is the Research Product Providers Dashboard?

The EOSC Research Products Provider Dashboard is a web interface that accepts research product onboarding requests for a given EOSC Data Source and guides providers using a personalised, user-friendly dashboard showing the necessary steps and status of the services to complete the validation and onboarding process.

What is the EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT)?

The EOSC Portal Onboarding Team (EPOT) is the cross-project collaborative team which manages and operates the EOSC Onboarding processes, which populate the EOSC Exchange, using the EOSC Profiles and according to the EOSC Rules of Participation.

Information Required about Providers and their Resources

The Onboarding Process requires a Provider to submit information about itself and about the resources it wants to include in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace.  The specific information required or optionally requested is specified in different “EOSC Profiles,” which are metadata standards for describing Providers and the different kinds of Resources that are supported in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace. Today this includes services, catalogues of services, data sources, research products in data sources (publications, research data, research software), and training resources. Current and new Providers are encouraged to assemble the information specified in the relevant documentation before proceeding to actually submit this information.
Specifications, and information needed, for each EOSC Profile can be found here:

Consult “Understanding the different types of EOSC Resources” to understand the differences between different kinds of EOSC Resources.

Understanding the different types of EOSC Resources

When to use ‘Catalogue’ instead of ‘Data Source’.  The difference between a ‘Resource’ and a ‘Research Product’.

The EOSC facilitates sharing and discovery of, and access to, EOSC resources, as provided by EOSC Providers, across different research infrastructure (RIs), clusters, national infrastructures, and beyond. Currently, the EOSC handles five type of resources: Services (e.g. computing, storage, scholarly communication, thematic, etc.), Catalogues of services (e.g. community or national catalogues), Data Sources (e.g. repositories, data archives, software repositories, library archives, publishers, etc), Research Products (e.g. publications, research data, research software, other products) deposited and made available via such data sources, and Training Resources (e.g. activity plan, assessment, assessment item, course/lesson plan, etc.). 

Currently, the term ‘resource’ is used in two ways in EOSC:

  • Generically, referring to all the possible types of research service, asset, and collections thereof that can be included in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace
  • Specifically, referring to a ‘service’ that accepts input (data), performs processing, and generates one or more outputs (data).

The EOSC Resource Profile is used to describe distinct services using the second meaning above, i.e. a service as a Resource.

Research Products: This is the largest category of EOSC Resources, including publications, such as articles, thesis, slides, reports, deliverables, research data, as well as research software, such as source code, scripts, workflows, or other products, such as compiled software, as well as executable items like container or virtual machine images. Each research product is a single item or a tightly integrated item (such as a compressed file containing source code, documentation, etc., an article combined with related data, or a Jupyter Notebook and its included data).  Note that Research Products are not directly onboarded to EOSC, but indirectly linked to EOSC through Data Sources that refer to them.

Data Sources: Data sources are EOSC services that host collections of research products. This includes data repositories, software repositories, and publication repositories. To be onboarded, data sources must be at least TRL8 and require EOSC Providers to supply a number of extra fields required for data sources. To onboard the related research products, a data source must support automatic ‘harvesting’ of the related metadata descriptions according to the EOSC Interoperability Framework Guidelines for Research Products. Currently, these guidelines require the data source to comply with specific harvesting protocols (OAI-PMH, FTP, others) and provide metadata compliant with OpenAIRE guidelines for literature (3.0, 4.0), data archives, or CRIS systems.  Note: When Data Sources support other services in addition to the harvesting of research products, for example, discipline specific annotation tools, those services should be onboarded to EOSC as separate EOSC Resources. 

Catalogues: Catalogues are listings of research services assembled by other groups and communities, e.g., thematic catalogues, regional catalogues.  By onboarding such Catalogues into the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, catalogue owners can then use the API to add some or all of their listed services directly in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace.

Training Resources: By training resource, we mean a resource offered by a provider on a continuous or long-term basis in one or more physical or digital representations, and that explicitly involves, specifies or entails a learning activity or learning experience. A learning activity or experience is one that has characteristics that are intended to improve or measure a person's knowledge, skills or abilities.
A training resource could be an:

  • activity plan,
  • assessment,
  • assessment item, 
  • course/lesson plan, 
  • educator curriculum guide, 
  • online course, 
  • physical learning resource, 
  • recorded lesson/course/webinar, 
  • supporting document, 
  • textbook, 
  • unit plan or 
  • other resource. 

Since a training resource is persistent it cannot be an event (though it can be a recording of an event). A training resource may reference other supporting materials, creative works, tools, etc. that do not themselves meet the definition of a training resource.

How to Submit Information to register EOSC Providers and Resources

Once the necessary information has been collected, EOSC Providers can use two methods to submit information for inclusion in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace:

  • Use the EOSC Service Providers Dashboard
  • Use API interfaces for EOSC

Where appropriate in the instructions below, the possibilities for using either the Service Providers Dashboard or the APIs are described in more detail. 

Note that the API allows information about multiple records (e.g. EOSC Resources) to be submitted or updated at a time, while the Service Providers Dashboard requires records to be submitted or updated one at a time.  To use the API, the Provider’s Representative needs to use the AAI of the Service Providers Dashboard to retrieve a new API token. (Consult https://providers.eosc-portal.eu/developers for more on the API Interfaces.)

Inclusion criteria for EOSC Providers and different kinds of EOSC Resources

The criteria that EPOT uses to assess the desired levels of quality and interoperability are called ‘EOSC Inclusion Criteria’.  There are several sets of EOSC Inclusion Criteria:

  • EOSC Exchange Provider Inclusion Criteria: These are considered when a new provider submits a registration to become an EOSC Provider. Provider Inclusion Criteria are listed at the top of this page ("Who Can Become an EOSC Provider?")
  • EOSC Exchange Resource Inclusion Criteria:  These are considered when an EOSC Provider submits their first EOSC Resource for inclusion, and when EPOT audits resources listed in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace.  These are general criteria that apply to all resource types. More details can be found in the attached document.
  • EOSC Exchange Catalogue Inclusion Criteria: These are considered when an EOSC Provider submits a catalogue for inclusion in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, and when EPOT audits external catalogues listed in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace. These inclusion criteria are applied in addition to the common Exchange Resource Inclusion Criteria.
  • EOSC Exchange Data Source Inclusion Criteria: These are considered when an EOSC Provider submits a data source for inclusion in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, and when EPOT audits data sources listed in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace. These inclusion criteria are applied in addition to the common Exchange Resource Inclusion Criteria.
  • EOSC Exchange Research Product Inclusion Criteria: These are considered when an EOSC Provider submits a research product for inclusion in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, and when EPOT audits EOSC Research Products listed in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace.  These inclusion criteria are applied in addition to the common Exchange Resource Inclusion Criteria.
  • EOSC Exchange Training Resource Inclusion Criteria: These are considered when an EOSC Provider submits a training resource for inclusion in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace, and when EPOT audits training resources listed in the EOSC Catalogue and Marketplace. These inclusion criteria are applied in addition to the common Exchange Resource Inclusion Criteria.

EPOT will review information submitted and apply the relevant inclusion criteria.  EPOT may contact the Provider’s Representative to gather more information or get clarification as needed.