Does your organisation, network or entity work with, support or provide digital services to researchers? Or do you have a concept for driving commercial service uptake among researchers in your region and Europe?

The EOSC Future project launched a new call for proposals to boost the uptake of digital services within the broader European research community.

Find out more about the call for proposals below and how you can express your interest in applying!

Deadline 15 December 2022

The gist

Through this call, digital service aggregators (e.g. non-profit entities, NRENs, RIs and e-Infrastructures, HPC centres, etc.) and OCRE cloud providers in the same region will collaborate on dynamic and creative proposals.

These proposals should demonstrate a concrete approach to distributing state-of-the-art digital services (e.g. compute, storage, machine learning, analytics, AI) via the European Open Science Cloud. We anticipate that these mechanisms could potentially drive strategy and relevance for many of the research infrastructures moving forward.

Accepted proposals will be awarded up to €400 000 (VAT excluded) in pre-procured IaaS/PaaS/SaaS (including professional services) from OCRE cloud providers (find the list of OCRE services in the EOSC Marketplace).

It is also worth noting that the call is:

• part of a €4.8M adoption funding programme supported by the EU (through the EOSC Future project). The first call aims to distribute €2M
• it targets digital service aggregators in the European R&E community in the EU and UK.

What makes a strong proposal?

Proposals must be able to showcase sustainable distribution mechanisms or methods for making commercial services available to researchers. Strong proposals will clearly lay out how an EOSC user could:

• consume these services for their research project(s)
• apply for support to take advantage of these services.

Proposals should also consider how these services may be integrated into EOSC in terms of:

• AAI and the Research and Education federations
• supplier service registration
• any other integration opportunities with the EOSC Interoperability Framework.

Get matched up with a commercial cloud provider!

If you want to apply for this call, you need to get matched with a commercial cloud service provider in your region (specifically, from the list of OCRE framework contract holders).

You can do both of the following:

• fill out the form on the EOSC Future website to be matched with a commercial cloud supplier
• get in touch directly with an OCRE cloud supplier near you.

About this call

The call is part of the EOSC Future WP8 work on enabling sustainable access to commercial services in EOSC. It builds on the experiences and achievements of the OCRE project, and on the delivery of contract management services for the OCRE agreements through the GN4-3 project; both of which are coordinated by GÉANT. The EOSC Future WP8 builds on this mechanism and aims to take the OCRE results to the next logical step by delivering a first iteration of a practical and sustainable approach to establish and maintain a portfolio of commercial services in EOSC that can be an integral part of the Minimum Viable EOSC (MVE).