Which Rules of Participation for EOSC?

The RCN supports the development of a universal entry point to provide access to the EOSC is necessary (in line with recommendation 5 "Implementation"), however it is important to also allow other entry points e.g. through already established and well-functioning platforms developed by ESFRIs and others.

Science Europe believes in the development of Open Science in a way that recognises the driving role of scientific communities in shaping and adopting Open Science practices. Science Europe therefore strongly supports the ambitions for the EOSC: to foster the FAIR principles for research data; to ensure the recognition of researchers' data skills; to allow easier replicability of results; to limit data wastage; and, to contribute to clarification of the funding model for data generation and preservation.

EIROforum has published its input for the consultation which is available online (https://www.eiroforum.org/wp-content/uploads/20180724-EIROforum-position-paper-EOSC.pdf | 24 July 2018).

This paper has also been attached below.

Universities and other research-performing organisations in the public sector must be provided preferential and easy access to EOSC as these user groups will be the biggest suppliers of data. Universities and other public research-performing organisations also primarily serve society and do not generate commercial revenue from their activities in most cases.

(Submission on behalf of EUA and its Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science)

Due to the speed of developments in research and technology, EOSC rules of participation need to be dynamic and adaptable to changing circumstances. This dynamism could foster new ground-breaking insights and propel innovation.

(Submission on behalf of EUA and its Expert Group on Science 2.0/Open Science)

The rules of participation as described in section 5 of the “Prompting an EOSC in practice: First Interim report” do not sufficiently reflect proposals made by Bilder, Lin and Neylon in their 2015 article “Principles for Open Scholarly Infrastructure-v1”, retrieved 31/07/2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1314859, in particular on mission-consistent revenue based on services rather than data.

EOSC will rely on the engagement of (early-career and senior) researchers who both produce and use the content stored on EOSC. These (early-career and senior) researchers will need to be incentivised to both open up their research and use EOSC to open up their research. Simply using EOSC will not be a strong enough incentive for the research community to use EOSC: these (early-career and senior) researchers will need to be rewarded in their research and career assessment for both opening up their research and using EOSC to open up their research.

EOSC has the potential to be a game changer in opening up access to research and setting an example for the shift towards Open Science in Europe. The development of EOSC has until now mostly focused on the technical infrastructure and service provision and has thus involved mostly infrastructure and service stakeholders. (Early-career and senior) researchers themselves will ultimately be content producers and content users of EOSC and as such need to be consulted as early as possible in the development process of EOSC.

An interesting aspect to be explored in EOSC is the role of the Blockchain communication protocol that identifies a technology based on the logic of the distributed database with the data stored on multiple machines linked together, considered as nodes. This methodology could play an important role in research inside EOSC at beyond the current paradigm of scientific communication understood as it is today. Platforms like Ethereum and hyperledger3 allow developers to build applications on a blockchain infrastructure.

Intellectual property rights relate to the legal protection offered to innovative and creative materials. Given that if we speak about Open Data the IPR issue on data is in conflict with the openness we are tending to.