The vision of EOSC-Life was to create an open collaborative digital space for European Life Science, Biological and Medical research, which directly addresses key societal challenges and drives the bio-economy.
This goal was successfully translated from a vision to a reality over the course of the project.
In order to ensure that European life science research remains competitive and advances the understanding of life and disease, research data and digital services need to be findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable (FAIR), regardless of the scientific discipline or national boundaries. Ensuring the FAIR availability of Europe’s life science data is critical to securing the reproducibility of biomedical research outcomes, fueling new scientific disciplines, and making sure that output from Europe’s life science research infrastructures has the full impact and is sustainable.
In EOSC-Life, 13 Biological and Medical Research Infrastructures in Europe joined forces to create an open, collaborative digital space for life science in the European Open Science Cloud. We have done this by publishing our data as FAIR Data Resources, linking reusable tools and workflows to standardised computing services in national life-science clouds, connecting our users across Europe to a single login authentication and resource authorisation system, and developing the data policies needed to preserve and deepen the trust of the research participants and patients who volunteer their data and samples.
The success of this project means that European scientists have improved access to advanced data services, technology platforms, samples, and support services throughout the European Research Area. The resulting data are openly accessible for reuse through the European Open Science Cloud in full compliance with all ethical, regulatory, and legal requirements.
As a user-driven project, EOSC-Life has achieved its vision by providing open calls for user research that allow our large user community to adopt advanced data management practices and access data integration and large-scale analysis tools in the cloud. The collaborative platform and our inclusive community and capacity building help to foster data science skills in life-science research.
Thus, by the end of this project, EOSC-Life has been successfully established as the new norm for digital biology in Europe – accessible to more than 500,000 life scientists in Europe.