Strategic reorganisation of the Task Forces
Following the completion of the two-year mandate of the original EOSC-A Task Forces in December 2023, a comprehensive assessment was undertaken by the EOSC-A Board of Directors in interaction with the Task Forces.
The Board not only determined the continuation, suspension, or reconfiguration of existing TFs, but also reached a consensus on the creation of new TFs.
A call for Task Force members is open from 21 March to 21 April 2024. You can read all of the details, find the new TF Terms of Reference for each of the new Task Forces, and apply to become a member on the call page.
The 13 EOSC Association Task Forces (2021-2023) address key areas of the implementation of EOSC.
They liaise with EOSC projects to offer feedback on developments, as well as identify strategic gaps and areas for investment to input to the SRIA, the EOSC Partnership’s Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda. An open call was held to define the membership of the Task Forces. This resulted in several hundred members of the community offering their expertise as volunteers to shape the future direction of EOSC.
The work of the Task Forces is focused on the development and deployment of the European Open Science Cloud. The key high-level areas addressed include:
Metadata and data quality
To ensure research objects can be discovered, understood and reused, as well as to define and implement benchmarks to assess the level of FAIRness and data quality to ensure content can be relied on.
- FAIR Metrics and Data Quality Task Force
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The FAIR metrics and Data Quality Task Force will implement the proposed FAIR metrics for EOSC by assessing their applicability across research communities and testing a range of tools to enable uptake. Recommendations will be made to update metrics and adopt tools as appropriate. In addition, the group will undertake a state of the art to understand measures of data quality, conducting several case studies to identify common features and dimensions to define an approach for EOSC.
- Semantic Interoperability Task Force
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The Semantic Interoperability Task Force will build on the EOSC Interoperability Framework to further develop and implement the semantic interoperability recommendations. This will include work on metadata standards, recommending how crosswalks should be enacted to allow alignment/matching of semantic artefacts. The group will organize workshops and hackathons to explore case studies and promote knowledge exchange.
- PID Policy and Implementation Task Force (PID TF)
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The PID Policy and Implementation Task Force (PID TF) is dedicated to identify the gaps in the PID ecosystem that has been mentioned in the current SRIA version, especially to highlight mature and recognised PID infrastructures for emerging resource types, to standardise the PID graph, to integrate PIDs into FAIR data management, and to address PIDs and sensitive data (among others). It will provide different kinds of recommendations on PIDs management and will set up criteria and certification of PIDs.
Research careers and curricula
The most important stakeholders for EOSC are the researchers.
- Data Stewardship, Curricula and Career Paths Task Force
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The Data stewardship, curricula and career paths Task Force will focus on the Data Stewards role and their core activities. To help researchers to make FAIR data it is necessary to have professional staff. To keep professional staff, we need to have a common curriculum for their skills and possibilities for career paths.
- Research Careers, Recognition and Credit Task Force
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The Research careers, recognition and credit Task Force will address incentives and rewards for researchers to manage and share their data, code and other research outputs, activities, and processes. To make Open Science happen it is necessary that criteria of Open Science and FAIR principles are an integral part of academic career progression and grant assessment processes.
- Upskilling Countries to Engage in EOSC Task Force
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The Upskilling countries to engage in EOSC Task Force is mainly focused on developments in Open Science education being addressed at Member State level within research performing organizations. The task force will assist in aligning skills initiatives and supporting the onboarding of these into EOSC. Without education in Open Science skills, it would be harder for researchers to live up to the necessary transformation of their working life.
- Researcher Engagement & Adoption Task Force (REA TF)
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The Researcher Engagement & Adoption Task Force (REA TF) is focused on engaging diverse research communities in order to increase their participation in EOSC. The engagement work should be conducted along and between disciplinary lines, utilising the achievements of the ESFRIs and thematic services, as well as on a country basis via engaging national initiatives, research performing organisations and scientific institutions, and by collaborating with representative bodies. This Task Force explores an aspect that is not part of the current SRIA version and will provide concrete plans to facilitate the onboarding of researchers in the EOSC ecosystem.
Technical challenges
Focus on implementing the technical architecture and interoperability in EOSC and steer strategic areas of future work, such as infrastructure for sharing quality research software.
- Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure Architecture (AAI) Task Force
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The Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure Architecture (AAI) Task Force aims to provide a consistent architecture for Authentication, Authorization and Access Control for the EOSC. This task will produce the next version of the EOSC AAI architecture while engaging with stakeholders to identify new use cases and requirements and analyse governance models for the EOSC AAI.
- Infrastructures for Quality Research Software Task Force
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The Infrastructures for Quality Research Software Task Force aims to foster the development and deployment of tools and services that allow researchers to properly archive, reference, describe with proper metadata, share and reuse research software, as well as to Improve their quality, both from the technical and organizational point of view. This task will actively engage with scholarly infrastructure providers for research software, leveraging in particular EOSC related projects and funding as well as explore tools, standards and platforms used in state-of-the-art software development and for quality control and formulate actionable recommendations. The Task Force will Identify standard-based best practices to write quality research software and identify both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to provide unbiased measurement of quality.
- Technical Interoperability of Data and Services Task Force
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The Technical Interoperability of Data and Services Task Force will take the EOSC Interoperability Framework (EIF) recommendations around technical architecture as their starting point to help develop the EOSC Core and Exchange as described in the SRIA. The TF will deliver key documents such as a first principles document and a landscape overview of the EIF, as well as technical architecture descriptions of the EIF, including examples of adaptation hints for major existing solutions.
- Long-Term Data Preservation Task Force
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Long-term open data archives and preservation services are required to enable a sustainable EOSC and the sustainable access to data. The possibility to reproduce, replicate and re-use scientific results depends on the long-term findability and accessibility of the underlying data. The Strategic Research and Innovation Agenda (SRIA) of the EOSC underlines the importance of long-term data preservation, but an explicit strategy has not been formulated. The Long-Term Data Preservation Task Force will provide recommendations on the vision and sustainable implementation of long-term data preservation policies and practices, as well as suggestions to later strategy execution. It will address the roles and responsibilities of the different stakeholders, the financial aspects of long-term preservation and the necessary service infrastructure.
Sustaining EOSC
EOSC’s long-term survival depends on the implementation of a scalable and sustainable EOSC ecosystem, including funding models and integration of national and thematic infrastructures that are closely coupled with the governance structures and legal entity.
- Financial Sustainability Task Force
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The objective of the Financial Sustainability Task Force is to produce a proposal for long term financial sustainability of the main building blocks of EOSC: EOSC-Core, EOSC-Exchange and the Federation of Data & Data Services as defined in the FAIR Lady report “Solutions for a Sustainable EOSC”.
- Rules of Participation Compliance Monitoring Task Force (RoP TF)
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The Rules of Participation Compliance Monitoring Task Force (RoP TF) will work on providing more practical criteria from the principles expressed in the current high-level EOSC RoP. It aims to define the monitoring process of the different RoPs by setting up a dedicated framework. Based on community involvement, it plans to establish a durable structure to manage the RoP in a sustainable perspective.