Business models

Detailed comments on the EOSC Rules of Participation on behalf of the TU Delft Library are available on the Open Working blog: https://openworking.wordpress.com/2018/08/03/comments-on-the-european-open-science-cloud-rules-of-participation/

The RCN believes that it is important to implement business models that ensure the long-term sustainability, development and maintenance of well-functioning and demanded services. The report presents the following three models; direct support, pure EOSC voucher and hybrid consisting of a combination of direct funding and EOSC vouchers. The RCN supports an extended hybrid model which also include different types of business models in addition to direct funding and EOSC vouchers.

The RCN thinks that the report “Prompting an EOSC in practice” contains innovative ideas on financing that contributes to “funding the operational costs of the EOSC Gateway/marketplace and the provision of key open data sets.” It proposes to compensate providers of data sets according to usage. Furthermore, the idea of "EOSC coins/vouchers" should be further investigated. It is important, though, to ensure that EOSC coins do not encourage the development of several providers offering more or less  the exact same services.

Given the dispersed nature of scientific research and the variety of tools and processes required by scientists in different fields and locations, a federated environment requires a similarly decentralized business model to support the technical environment that will be developed. The development of novel capabilities, long-term storage/maintenance of data resources and fixed cost capabilities are likely to be provided using direct payments to organisations setting up nodes in the EOSC.