The ambition of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is to develop “Web of FAIR Data and services’ for science in Europe. EOSC will be a multi-disciplinary environment where researchers can publish, find and re-use data, tools and services, enabling them to better conduct their work.

EOSC builds on existing infrastructure and services supported by the EC, Member States and research communities. It brings these together in a federated ‘system of systems’ approach, adding value by aggregating content and enabling services to be used together.

This environment will operate under well-defined conditions to ensure trust and safeguard the public interest. Expectations of service providers and users will be made explicit to ensure appropriate behaviour.

EOSC will improve the situation for researchers in many ways, namely:

• Seamless access to content and services via common AAI,
• Access to data from various sources which is FAIR and ideally open,
• Access to services for storage, computation, analysis, preservation and more,
• Adoption of standards so data and services can be combined,
• Helpdesk, training and support to improve use of EOSC.

EOSC is recognised by the Council of the European Union as the pilot action to deepen the new European Research Area (ERA). It is also recognised as the science, research and innovation data space which will be fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data.