The European Commission (EC), as several international policymakers, supports the vision of global, transparent, data-driven Open Science by articulating in the framework of its Digital Single Market Strategy and European Cloud Initiative, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). However, the goal of offering to 1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals a virtual environment with open and seamless services, is a highly challenging one. Among the foreseen actions in the ‘Roadmap for EOSC’, the ‘Prototyping New Innovative Services’, although comprises significant scientific, technological, innovation and exploitation challenges, can have a major impact towards successfully fulfilling EOSC and EC goals.
In this context, NEANIAS draws an ambitious path dedicated to comprehensively address the ‘Prototyping New Innovative Services’ challenge. NEANIAS has: i) identified current gaps in EOSC service offerings; ii) strategically engaged popular scientific and professional communities seeking open science solutions in the underwater, atmospheric and space environments/ research sectors; iii) defined an ambitious yet efficient portfolio of novel EOSC services including cross-cutting thematic and interdisciplinary core ones; iv) brought in state-of-the-art mature software already demonstrated in relevant environments with the objective to co-design, fit-for purpose solutions addressing key and challenging data cycle and reuse tasks; v) identified promising innovation aspects and establish a cutting-edge innovation hub for exploiting and incubating all business case opportunities.
NEANIAS will promote Open Science practices and play active role in the materialization of the EOSC ecosystem by efficiently engaging large scientific and professional communities; actively contributing to the technological, procedural, strategic and business development of EOSC. NEANIAS will drive the co-design and delivery of innovative thematic services, derived from state-of-the-art research assets and practices in three major sectors: Underwater research, Atmospheric research and Space research, each engaging multitudinous academic and business groups, numerous researchers, professionals and governmental entities.
From a technological perspective, NEANIAS will deliver innovative thematic services that are flexible and open to accommodate the needs of communities beyond their original definition, and able to adapt to neighbouring cases, fostering reproducibility and re-usability. The cross-cutting thematic services, as well as, the foreseen core ones will depart the fragmented ecosystem of current applied eScience, research technologies and infrastructures, towards entering the EOSC hub ecosystem reaching access to resources of unprecedented breadth and sizing, and together, starting from solid foundations (TRL6), reach a level of full trustworthiness (TRL8).
The new NEANIAS services will not only address community-specific needs but will, also, enable the transition of the respective communities to EOSC concept and Open Science principles. By achieving this, NEANIAS provides its communities with plentiful resource access, collaboration instruments and interdisciplinary research means, which will amplify and broaden the research and knowledge generation activities of every user community.
From a business perspective, NEANIAS aims to lift the barriers that hinder industry / research engagement (e.g., data availability and access challenges, big data handling and analytics challenges, research reproducibility, ethics and regulations) and lay a viable business plan for the services in question, identifying new actors and business opportunities in the Open Science value chain, engaging the Industry/SMEs, researchers and governance stakeholders, in several roles (as producers / consumers). NEANIAS intends to leverage EOSC not only via its service offerings but also by drawing on impactful, well established results on technological, procedural, strategic and business perspectives that will be extensively validated by stakeholders and business experts and will provide new ground for establishing EOSC activities. Last, but not least, NEANIAS has been designed to serve and strengthen EOSC-Hub, EOSC concept and the Open Science paradigm, by adding to the emergence of the pan-European Open Science era, technology, feedback-providing, dissemination, capacity building, and outreach activities, which are all included in project’s work plan.
