National Nodes - Getting organised; how far are we?

e-IRG is a recognised strategic body composed of national delegates to facilitate integration in the area of European e-Infrastructures and connected services, within and between Member States, at the European level and globally. This e-IRG policy document addresses the role of the national nodes - including their coordination with the thematic ones - in the implementation of the e-Infrastructure Commons and its instantiation as the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The document "National Nodes, getting organized, how far are we?" thus covers both the situation within and between member states and should be considered as a snapshot at the time of publication. e-IRG is overlooking the whole e-Infrastructure spectrum, from networking and computing to data and other services (such as middleware, software and related tools/services), covering not only short-term but also longer-term aspects, advising both Member States and the European Commission. Thus, the document covers all e-Infrastructure components, with emphasis on governance, funding and access policies. It should be noted that e-IRG does not undertake any operative role or implementation mandates, e.g. within EOSC or EuroHPC and keeps an advisory role.

The EOSC initiative is intended to comprise policy decisions as well as the concrete implementation to support the Open Science policy the Europe Union and its Member States or Associated Countries have committed to.

Today, in May 2019, the degree to which different e-Infrastructures are coordinated and made interoperable within the entire e-Infrastructure landscape at national and international level varies hitherto heavily from country to country in Europe. e‐IRG advocates an interoperable, federated ecosystem of domain-specific (vertical) Research Infrastructure and generic (horizontal) e-Infrastructures already at national level, which will facilitate the European level federation, such as in the form of EOSC.