European Open Science Cloud - EOSC EU Node

The objective of EOSC is to provide researchers and innovators in Europe with an open and trusted multi-disciplinary environment where they can publish, find and reuse data, tools and services for research and innovation. Through this environment, EOSC aims to mobilise, align and scale data and services across Europe to accelerate open science, higher productivity and increased reproducibility and trust in research.

EOSC is recognised by the Council of the European Union among the priority actions of the policy agenda of the European Research Area (ERA) with the objective to deepen open science practices in Europe. It is also recognised as the common European research and innovation data space, articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data.

The implementation of EOSC is currently taking place in the context of the EOSC European co-programmed partnership according to a Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA), which is co-developed with the EOSC community.
The future support and funding of EOSC is under discussion in the context of the next Multi-Annual Financial Framework (FP10) preparations.

EOSC EU Node in action

EOSC EU Node is an operational platform owned by the European Commission that serves as a reference node implementation for end-users promoting open science principles as well as a hub for the EOSC Federation offering core federating capabilities.

As a node blueprint, it primarily supports multi-disciplinary and multi-national research promoting the use of FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data and supplementary services at the EU level. Within this environment researchers can find easy-to-use tools and the much-needed support to both individually and collectively, plan, execute, disseminate, and assess their typical research workflows and outcomes across the EOSC ecosystem.

As a hub for the federation, it facilitates the creation and operalization of the EOSC Federation following the system of systems architectural principle. It aims to provide a technical and administrative blueprint and interoperability framework for other potential infrastructure node candidates to be established. EOSC EU Node can be recognised as the first European-level node of the EOSC Federation promoted by the European Commission as an operationalized platform in production.

In the first two years of operations, the EOSC EU Node gathered more than 50.000 visitors, 6000 registered users who can search across 190+ million research products (data, publication, software) and got 7.7 million virtual credits allocated in total to execute research workflows (data analytics, simulations, visualizations, code execution, etc.) supported by interoperable productivity tools such as file sync and share, collaborative editing, automated application deployment and large file transfer services in a multi-disciplinary research context. 

EOSC Federation in production 

In October 2026, the EOSC Federation entered into production, marking a major milestone in the development of a connected European research ecosystem. Highlighted at the EOSC Symposium 2026 in Florence, the federation brings together 14 operational nodes, including the EOSC EU Node, connecting national, regional and thematic research infrastructures across Europe.

By connecting existing research infrastructures and enabling the effective sharing and reuse of research data, the federation reduces fragmentation, facilitates access to valuable research resources across institutional and national boundaries, and fosters cross-border and interdisciplinary scientific collaboration.  As additional nodes join and its capabilities expand, the EOSC Federation will further strengthen Europe's capacity to leverage trusted research data for data-driven scientific discovery, AI-enabled research and innovation, contributing to Europe's research excellence and competitiveness.

EOSC EU Node framework procurement in 2026

The EOSC procurement 2026 – as foreseen in the Horizon Europe Research Infrastructures Work Programme 2026-2027 “Managed services for the EOSC Platform (EOSC EU Node)” – is to takeover and ensure the incremental improvement and continuous operation, maintenance and support of the integrated suite of managed services that constitute the EOSC EU Node platform in production, as a service owned by the European Commission. It is designed as a 4-year framework within which the Commission can call-off the necessary managed services and development work to best serve the evolving EOSC Federation, its operational nodes, end-users and other stakeholders. 
Programme 2021-2022 provisions.

More on this procurement action

EOSC EU Node has initially been procured in 2022

To capitalise on the considerable research and innovation effort, a fully operational enabling infrastructure node for EOSC has initially been procured by the European Commission as part of the Horizon Europe, Research Infrastructures, Work Programme 2021-2022 provisions.

Details of the public procurement action 2022

Background

The Commission intends to unlock the reuse potential of different types of data and facilitate its free flow across borders to achieve a European digital single market, for the benefit of the economy and society.

EOSC is a fundamental enabler of open science and of the digital transformation of the research innovation sector. It offers the possibility to access and reuse all publicly funded research data in Europe, across scientific disciplines and countries. By federating existing research data infrastructures, EOSC leverages national investments and adds value in terms of scale, interdisciplinarity and faster innovation.

The EOSC EU Node was initially procured by the European Commission DG CONNECT in 2022 to provide a reference implementation and operational example for EOSC Nodes to be established and also to ensure the creation and production roll out of the EOSC Federation as a European level hub. The EOSC EU Node was launched into production by the EOSC Symposium in October 2024 in Berlin, Germany. The EOSC Federation, with the first 14 operational nodes, was ultimately launched two years later at the EOSC Symposium 2026 in Florence, Italy. The current procurement provides the framework for continuous operations of the EOSC EU Node until the end of 2030, subject to available funding.