Building Blocks for the Federated Future of EOSC – EOSC Beyond Reaches Month 18

As the only ongoing Horizon Europe project specifically dedicated to architecting the next generation of core services for the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Federation, EOSC Beyond has reached a significant milestone. After 18 months of intensive co-design and development, we are sharing our foundational progress in helping transform EOSC into a truly federated, interoperable, and user-driven ecosystem.

"The results from EOSC Beyond's first phase are building blocks for the entire EOSC Federation. We are not just working to serve the current candidate Nodes in the build-up group; we are creating the open, scalable, and interoperable foundation that will allow any research community or infrastructure to connect and co-create value for research across borders and disciplines." — Diego Scardaci, EOSC Beyond Project Director, EGI Foundation

Our work focuses on moving beyond a centralised model to a dynamic network where national, regional, and thematic EOSC Nodes can seamlessly collaborate. Here are some of our key accomplishments from April 2024 to September 2025:

A major milestone was the launch of the EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox, a pre-production testbed now open to the community, which was introduced in our first public webinar. This environment enables service providers, research infrastructures, and potential Node operators to test integrations with EOSC Core capabilities in a realistic and risk-free setting.

Explore the Sandbox and get in touch to test your services: https://sandbox.eosc-beyond.eu/

Our early vision, captured in the concept paper “EOSC Federation: Architecture and Federating Capabilities”, quickly became a reference document for the community, with nearly 2,000 downloads on Zenodo. This work directly contributed to the newly published EOSC Federation Handbook, providing the architectural blueprint for the federated EOSC build-up phase.

We have significantly upgraded existing EOSC Core services, including Authentication & Authorisation (AAI), the Service Catalogue, Monitoring, Helpdesk, and Persistent Identifiers, to support the federated model. These services are now more scalable, interoperable, and available as white-label solutions, making it easier for organisations to establish their own EOSC Nodes.

EOSC Beyond is developing two innovative services designed to accelerate research and service integration, which were recently presented in a public webinar:

The project has successfully onboarded and interconnected 10 diverse Pilot Nodes from domains including social science, structural biology, climate science, and biodiversity. These pilots are not just testing technology; they are demonstrating tangible scientific workflows. 

Each Pilot Node has produced a factsheet and a user-story video showcasing how federation enables new research possibilities, from booking scientific instruments across borders to performing complex data analysis close to the source. Discover their stories on our Pilots page.

These achievements mark just the beginning. As we continue to build a more open, connected, and efficient research infrastructure for Europe, we invite the entire EOSC community to engage with our work.

Explore our results and documentation on our website