What’s in the EOSC for DARIAH partner institutions?

EOSC is a big acronym, representing the bold vision of enabling all European researchers to deposit, access and analyse scholarly resources beyond borders and disciplines. Over the past years, it has become a central component of European science policy and, since its launch in October 2018, a reality as an infrastructure too. Still, due to the scale, the complexity and the multiple dimensions of the endeavour, it is not easy to gain an accurate overview and translate the offerings of the EOSC into one’s own institution or research setting. In this series of blog posts, we outline concrete ways in which scholarly and service provider communities around DARIAH can interact with the EOSC and the value it holds for them. We also summarize the many ways in which DARIAH already contributes to the EOSC. 

In this second post, we are focusing on what it means for DARIAH national nodes and partner institutions to join/contribute to the EOSC. You can find the first and third episodes of the series here and here.

Onboarding services to the EOSC catalogue 

As a DARIAH institution, you are a potential service provider for the EOSC. It means that your service(s) can be registered (i.e onboarded) in the EOSC catalogue & marketplace. In this post, we share insights on how you can register DARIAH-affiliated services to the EOSC and what are the added values.

First of all and as explained on the EOSC portal (https://eosc-portal.eu/for-providers), joining the EOSC as a service provider is an opportunity to highlight your services’ offer and to attract new users. Onboarding your service, in the current architecture of the EOSC, means populating the EOSC-Exchange layer. While the EOSC-Core is the set of generic services (such as the Authentication and Authorization Infrastructure (AAI)) required to operate the EOSC, the EOSC-Exchange brings together thematic resources provided by Research Infrastructures and science (or thematic)  clusters (such as SSHOC) to serve the needs of research communities. Since research is still organized along disciplinary or thematic lines, even in transdisciplinary settings, these thematic services are the primary guarantors of community uptake of the EOSC. And your service(s) can be part of this!

 Diagram of the EOSC-Core and EOSC-Exchange from the EOSC-Future project proposal. (MVE stands for: Minimum Viable EOSC.)

By adding your service(s) on the EOSC catalogue, you put them “on the EU map” of available resources. Even if your service is primarily targeting a national audience, the EOSC onboarding of DARIAH affiliated resources will act as a kind of “quality seal”. We cannot stress enough how gaining EU visibility can be very useful when seeking national funding, and this can be a good way to enhance your existing service(s).  

Organising the EOSC onboarding within the DARIAH network  Depending on the profile of the national institution you belong to, the approach taken to onboard the services you provide might be very different. Here are two options we foresee at the moment. Let’s do it together – part of the work going on about the DARIAH service offer aims at identifying the services we collectively want to promote at the EU level for the Arts & Humanities. The main rationale for any federated infrastructure is to avoid duplication of work (when it comes to metadata collection and quality assessment of services for example) and  to build a consolidated offer. Currently, several DARIAH bodies are investigating the best ways to connect some of the DARIAH in-kind contributions to the EOSC Portal catalogue. First DARIAH onboarded services could make their way to the EOSC catalogue by the end of 2021.     Do it yourself – if your institution is already organised to onboard relevant Arts & Humanities services in the EOSC, we first recommend that you keep your DARIAH National Coordinator (NC) in the loop, because this process should be aligned with the DARIAH in-kind contributions declaration managed by your NC. The self-assessment and the external evaluation included in the declaration are indeed important mechanisms to guarantee the quality of DARIAH affiliated services. Secondly, we also recommend that you indicate the connection to  DARIAH on the provider profile and and in the resource profile while onboarding your national DARIAH service.

Connecting to EOSC at large or to the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud

 In addition to being listed as an EOSC service, working to meet the EOSC requirements is also a way to increase the connectivity on the level of services to the rest of the EOSC. Achieving interoperability with the larger Open Science and technical framework of the EOSC is key to connecting the SSH data landscape with discipline-agnostic scholarly information management systems that are used or will be used for discovery or for assessment of scholars’ work.

The outcomes of the OpenAIRE Advance project shows the potential in connecting domain-specific services operating on the national levels (NAKALA and  TextGrid) to the biggest publicly owned European scholarly discovery environment. 

On the other hand though, not all services may be fully relevant to be brought to the broadest level of EU integration. Some are best positioned to be connected, or lifted up, to smaller thematic clouds within the EOSC. And this is exactly why DARIAH is developing an “intermediary” layer of services and recommendations for Arts & Humanities communities. 

Let’s just take the example of the SSH Open Marketplace. It provides visibility (and discoverability) for more diverse and granular (smaller or bigger) Arts and Humanities resources than the EOSC catalogue, and can be a perfect place to register your assets that are not meant to make their way to the EOSC catalogue.

Click and re-use EOSC resources in your own environment 

Naturally, the EOSC operates along bidirectional exchanges: it’s not only about registering your services but you are also allowed, even encouraged, to reuse EOSC resources and adapt them to your own environment. It is already possible to use some of the EOSC generic services. Thanks to DARIAH contribution to the Horizon 2020 project EOSC-Future, we will gain expertise and a clear overview of possibilities to reuse EOSC-Core components and to “plug” them to existing infrastructures or services (e.g.: adding a helpdesk to an existing service or implementing the EOSC AAI for example). Furthermore, you can also reuse thematic resources and tailor them to your own needs. For instance, it is already possible to build on top of the APIs of the SSH Open Marketplace, the EOSC catalogue, the OpenAire community dashboard or the OpenAire Research Graph and to reuse the aggregators’ content to only keep what matters for your local communities. 

We hope that this post clarifies what you, as a DARIAH partner institution, can gain from the EOSC. We strive to collectively clarify the ever changing onboarding workflows and increase the connectivity opportunities for your resources, in continuity with DARIAH’s vision.    

---

---