EOSC Strategic Implementation Plan and EB Working Groups come alive. EOSC EB Meeting Updates, 27 June 2019

By: Cathrin Stover, EOSC Executive Board Vice Chair

The EOSC Executive Board (EB) met once more before the summer on 27 June in Brussels. Before I start with an overview of what we discussed in this latest meeting, here are a couple of links which provide additional information. One is the Register of European Commission expert groups, which describes the EOSC EB and where you can also always find the minutes of our meetings. See more here:

http://ec.europa.eu/transparency/regexpert/index.cfm?do=groupDetail.groupDetail&groupID=3632&NewSearch=1&NewSearch=1

The second link that I would like to share is the EC Open Science site which also now makes available the EOSC Governance Board delegates, available here:  http://ec.europa.eu/research/openscience/pdf/ec_rtd_eosc-governance-board_062019.pdf#view=fit&pagemode=none

But let’s start with the meeting: I have mentioned the Strategic Implementation Plan a few times in these blog posts and I am happy to report that we now have SIP Version 1.0 available for you to have a look at. You can find the document here: https://www.eoscsecretariat.eu/eosc-governance/eosc-executive-board

It is an interesting read and sets our objectives for the next 18 months, so please check it out. The second document that we have been working on and which will be made public as soon as possible is the work plan of the EOSC EB, this should be available asap, watch this space.

Working Groups developments

Most of the discussion in the EB meeting was around the EOSC EB Working Groups (Sustainability, Landscape, FAIR, RoP and Architecture – more info here: https://www.eoscsecretariat.eu/eosc-working-groups) which have all now been launched with first meetings already done or in the calendar for early July. We have received many questions from the community on how to interact with the WGs and first of all, let me thank you for the interest. I would like to go back and clarify again how the WG compositions have come together and will continue to grow. This came together as follows:

• Nominations by Governance Board (accepted into all WGs) in May

• Nominations by Executive Board (FAIR WG) in May

• Nominations by H2020 projects (Architecture WG) in May

• Open calls to engage wider stakeholders (Architecture, FAIR and Rules of Participation) – to be launched later this summer

• WGs may call in Experts, H2020 projects and commission consultancy reports to be launched if, when and where needed

Engagement opportunities

But back to the question on how you can interact: there was the first EOSC Webinar on Monday 1 July and more blogs and webinars will follow. Due to the nature of the work, we expect the FAIR, RoP and Architecture WGs to be more interactive with the community on a more regular basis and here we will also see an open call coming out later this summer. The first aim of all the WGs at this stage is to fully engage with all existing and upcoming H2020 EOSC-related projects to ensure that the WGs built onto the work already carried out. For example, the EOSC Pilot project presented during our meeting and has provided the EOSC EB now with an overview of the deliverable documents of their project and how these map to the EOSC WGs. This, is of course, ideal input for the WGs.

Another item on our agenda was the stakeholder engagement coordinated by the EOSCsecretariat. We received an update from the Turin event at the beginning of June which was attended by the INFRA-EOSC-5b projects, FAIRsFAIR (5c) and the Cluster projects. More of these coordination days will take place during the year. There will also be an EOSC event alongside the RDA event in Helsinki on 22 October 2019. During this event, we will give an update on where we are as EB and GB, and we will also hold open WG workshops in the afternoon of 22 October. Being collocated with RDA, we also hope to attract some international interest in EOSC and hope to be able to gather input from Open Science initiatives from around the world.

The 3-day EOSC Symposium which will take place in Budapest in November is also taking shape – please save the dates: 26 to 28 November!

Communications task force set up, more updates

A few more matters that I should report on:

We have started a small internal EB Task Force led by Ron Dekker, where we will be looking specifically at our external communications as the EOSC EB, as well as the need to coordinate with the communications experts of all the EOSC related projects to see how we can pull our overall EOSC communications together towards more alignment in the messaging. This group was only launched this week, so we will need to put some work into it over the summer. So, again, watch this space.

Equally, we have taken the decision that we need to get started on a few more WGs, our first priority here will be a Skills and Training WG and Natalia Manola has volunteered to pull input into the definition of this WG together for our next meeting. We are further considering to start an activity on interacting with initiatives around the world (other continents) to ensure we stay tuned to the developments elsewhere.

And last not least, we have had to say “Adios and Good-Bye” to our EB member Stephan Kuster, who has left Science Europe for a well-deserved sabbatical and therefore also leaves the EB. Science Europe has communicated Stephan’s succession and Conor O’Carroll will be leading the Sustainability WG together with Rupert Lück until Lidia Borrell Damián joins Science Europe officially in September 2019.

That’s it, thanks again for reading