EOSC-Pillar legal and policy framework, federation blueprint now online

The development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is influenced by the parallel development at the national and regional levels. Requirements for open data, data protection and cross border data access rely on a common understanding of existing regulations procedures in countries and their differences.

EOSC-Pillar's Work Package 4 "From National Initiatives to Transnational Services" recently produced an essential deliverable, presenting the legal and organisational aspects of services delivery in a federated environment, including recommendations for actions that enable service providers to position their services for improved interoperation in the context of the EOSC services landscape. 

The document only covers the legal and policy environments of EOSC-Pillar participating countries Austria, Belgium, France, Germany and Italy. The objectives of this deliverable are:

• a study of the legal and policy state of the art in the involved countries, highlighting commonalities to be leveraged and gaps or challenges to be tackled in order to help harmonise and improve the national policies and strategies related to FAIR data and Open Science,
• proposing recommendations for the rules and procedures with respect to legal issues regarding open access and open data,
• proposing policy recommendations for services management, focusing on the management of service level agreements, and
• delivering a blueprint for EOSC which can be used by service providers as a guideline for legal aspects of service and data provisioning in a European and an international context

Towards a federated landscape

The document sketches a policy and legal framework by building upon the existing national policies, delivers recommendations, and considers the aspects that come with agreement on service delivery in a federated IT landscape. These can help to establish a governance structure for service providers and other organisations that handle scientific data.

The team investigated the existence and relevance of selected policies that are required when service providers apply for participation in EOSC. The number of policies as well as the requirement of the existence of a certain policy depends on several factors, linking with the EOSC Rules of Participation and the Service Description Profile currently being refined by EOSC Enhance in collaboration with EOSC-hub and the InfraEOSC-5b projects, including EOSC-Pillar. 

Read the full report on Zenodo!