EOSC Beyond Featured in ERCIM News Special Issue on Open Science

We are pleased to share that an article on the EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox has been published in the April 2026 edition of ERCIM News (Issue 144), as part of the special theme "Open Science Experiences and Prospects."

The article, titled "The EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox: A Launchpad for Europe's Open Science Federation," was authored by Federico Drago and Nicola Fiore of the EGI Foundation on behalf of the EOSC Beyond project. It presents the Sandbox as a pre-production environment where research infrastructures can test their integration with the EOSC Federation in a safe, controlled setting.

Guest edited by Leonardo Candela (CNR-ISTI) and Roberto Di Cosmo (Inria and University Paris Cité), the special theme explores the current state of Open Science across Europe. The editors note that while Open Science has become an operational requirement embedded in national strategies and funding conditions, fragmentation remains a key challenge. The issue brings together contributions on federated infrastructures, semantic frameworks, governance, skills, and operational experiences from major European initiatives.

The EOSC Beyond article sits within a cluster of contributions focusing on operational experiences with federated science gateways, alongside pieces on the EOSC EU Node, the ENVRI-Hub, D4Science virtual research environments, and other initiatives.

Our contribution describes how the EOSC Core Innovation Sandbox functions as a "Federator Test Node," offering a full suite of Core Federating Capabilities (including AAI, Helpdesk, Monitoring, and the Node Registry) for validation before production deployment. The article highlights how ten diverse Pilot Nodes have already used the Sandbox to test integrations and validate real-world scientific user stories, from cross-domain data fusion to "compute close to data" workflows.

The full ERCIM News Issue 144 is available online: