EOSC-Pillar coordinates national open science efforts across Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy, ensuring their contribution to and readiness for the implementation of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).

The project aims to support the coordination and harmonisation of national initiatives relevant to EOSC in Europe and investigate their future federation. EOSC-Pillar will help integrate initiatives and service providers through the development of common policies and tools based on open science and FAIR data principles, facilitating their adoption by user communities.

The project has the ambition to propose the initiatives for the coordination of data infrastructures and services recently started in many EU Member States as one of the founding pillars for the construction, development, and long-term sustainability of the EOSC.

Coherently with this vision, EOSC-Pillar started with an initial group of neighbouring countries who are active in the field of open science, to define and set a model to harmonise and federate the initiatives. The real challenge here is that, despite having very similar objectives and visions, and similar compositions, the initiatives adopt different approaches, need to abide by different national laws and regulations, and have very different funding models and relations with the decision-makers.

For this reason, the task of harmonising the different national experiences is not trivial, but succeeding at it means to bring in the picture all the advantages brought by the adaptation to national peculiarities.

EOSC-Pillar takes the challenge to build on such specificities and heterogeneity to enhance the level of collaboration among the five EU Member States, bringing a rich and well-organised contribution to EOSC. In a motto, pursuing unity in diversity.