News: Post event report: EOSC EU Node services supporting collaboration and data-driven research

Post event report: EOSC EU Node services supporting collaboration and data-driven research

The Infoshare “EOSC EU Node services in action” held on April 22, 2026, showcased the EOSC EU Node services and their value for researchers. This online meeting brought together 43 participants from 25 organisations across 16 European countries – policymakers, university staff, and representatives of e-Infrastructures and National Research and Education Networks (NRENs). The event covered an overview of the services and the EOSC EU Node plans, training, NREN support, and research use cases. It gave participants the possibility to exchange their experiences, ask questions, and discuss the most pressing issues. The Infoshare was organised by the GÉANT Special Interest Group on Research Engagement Development (SIG-RED) as part of a series of webinars covering the contribution of European e-Infrastructures to EOSC, supported by the European e-Infrastructures Assembly.

The EOSC EU Node is a collaborative environment built on the FAIR principles, promoting transparency and accessibility with Open Science at its core. Currently, it comprises a robust set of 6 publicly available services: File Sync & Share, Interactive Notebooks, Large File Transfer, Virtual Machines, Cloud Container Platform, and Bulk Data Transfer. These services address key challenges in modern research workflows, enabling researchers to work efficiently in data-intensive environments, across disciplines and across borders. The application and infrastructure services of the EOSC EU Node have been selected to support a wide range of research domains, providing a common baseline for researchers in all fields.

Peter Szegedi of the European Commission’s DG CNECT provided a summary of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), recognized as a European data space focused primarily on research and innovation. He emphasized the importance of the establishment of the EOSC EU Node – the first reference European-level node of the EOSC Federation. This node has 2 basic functions: it operates as an example node for all other typical nodes in the Federation, and also (with its special role) offers core federating capabilities, including authentication, accounting, monitoring, and helpdesk support. After the initial EC investment, re-procurement is planned to ensure the continued operation of the EOSC EU Node beyond February 2027. Within the evolution of the Node, since its official launch in October 2024, the amount of virtual credits for researchers has increased from 500 to 2000 (6000 credits per group), providing easy, low-barrier access to an execution environment to experiment and invite other peers to work with. The EOSC EU Node will be interfederated with the EuroHPC Federation Platform – an access point to Europe’s most advanced computing resources. Both are backed by GÈANT’s MyAccessID authentication service, so single sign-on in the same browser will allow access to them.

Maja Dolinar of OpenAIRE presented training materials designed to support users in their uptake through the EOSC EU Node Learning Center, hosted on OpenPlato, a Moodle-based platform developed by OpenAIRE. Researchers can access a range of tutorials and courses. Tutorials deliver concise service overviews, use case examples, and step-by-step access instructions. Courses offer in-depth guidance on all service functions. Each course concludes with a final quiz; successful completion grants a course-specific certificate. Two individual learning paths are available for researchers to enroll: the “Foundation Explorer” path, which introduces basic EOSC EU Node features and services, and the “Research Practitioner” path, which comprehensively covers all services and tools. Attendees were encouraged to join the EOSC EU Node User Forum to give feedback on their experience. Additionally, researchers were invited to participate in the next EOSC EU Node “Ask Me Anything” session to be held on May 21, 2026, at 12:00 CEST.

Olga Popcova of RENAM, the Moldovan NREN, spoke about promoting EOSC EU Node services from both marketing communication and research engagement perspectives. Through seminars for Moldovan R&E organisations, EOSC EU Node services are highlighted alongside NREN offerings. At a practical level, the EOSC EU Node allows users to access data and software on the cloud, share tools and files, use collaborative workbooks and virtual machines – all with simple authentication methods. Checking the latest version of the EOSC EU Node User Access Policy (currently 2.3.4) is recommended to stay informed about updates and new opportunities. She outlined several benefits for NRENs: improved end-user engagement, usefulness of common baseline services for any domain, authentication via eduGAIN to extend the national Identity Federation, access for the European R&E community (including Horizon Europe Associated Countries, not only to EU27), advocacy for Open Science, and support for open source developments (since all 6 services rely on open source tools and software, such as ownCloud, JupyterHub, FileSender, OpenStack, OKD, and FTS).

Angeliki Adamaki of Uppsala University introduced the HOMEROS (Harmonising Observations from Multi-hazard Environments in Research for Open Science) project, funded by an OSCARS (Open Science Clusters’ Action for Research and Society) grant and supported by the ENRI community, in the domain of Environmental and Earth Sciences. With a particular focus on geohazard assessment, the project has research groups in seismology, geodesy and geology that investigate hazard for risk assessment related to earthquakes, floods, and landslides. The project study areas are in Greece, in multi-hazard environments like the West Corinth Gulf and the South Ionian Islands, all recognized as high-risk zones threatened by diverse natural disasters. Participating research groups use rich data they collect at their home institutions and combine it with data from other sources (remote databases, data supported by research infrastructures or integration platforms). As early adopters of the EOSC EU Node, the team had the chance to test its services to support the FAIRification of their research workflows, making science more open and more inclusive.

Vasilis Anagnostou of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki presented a use case on machine learning applications in seismology (particularly on a specific earthquake sequence from early 2024), utilizing the EOSC EU Node Interactive Notebooks service. He showed a demo video on how a scalable, reproducible JupyterLab ecosystem enables transparent collaboration within research teams (such as between supervisors and postgraduate students). The EOSC EU Node File Sync & Share service facilitates sharing the notebook results, figures, and outputs among team members. All these digital tools can be interlaced within day-to-day research processes, making them easier: the notebook gathers raw open and FAIR seismological data from stations available in EPOS repository; relevant Python libraries used in seismology and a specific machine learning algorithm applied to detect earthquakes hidden in these recordings; the initial earthquake catalog is created; two visualization outputs and one specialized output (seismic phase file) for further analysis for this early catalog are produced. As a result, a research publication for this particular earthquake sequence is obtained.

Ion-Anastasios Karolos of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki presented the second use case on how the EOSC EU Node Virtual Machines service provides a reproducible and controlled environment for geodetic data processing. He outlined different configurations – small, medium, and large – each offering various computational capabilities. Users can specify parameters to balance computational efficiency and credit consumption, set network options, use SSH key-based authentication, and configure security rules. After configuring the virtual machine, all required software, including Python, scientific libraries, and pre-compiled open source geodetic tools such as RTKLIB or Tefnut, can be installed. As a result, an automated Precise Point Positioning analysis can be run; the processing is executed through Python scripts, integrating external geodetic software – and the system processes observation data and generates time series of integrated water vapor, allowing researchers to analyze the atmospheric and moisture variations throughout the day. This solution is practical for executing customized or complex processing pipelines and offers the flexibility to configure, automate, and scale workflows as needed. An important feature is the ability to create snapshots of virtual machines, ensuring the system is easily recoverable. This makes the platform suitable not only for research purposes, but also for costing operational geodetic services and continuous data-processing pipelines.

All presentations are available for download: https://events.geant.org/event/2130/