The meeting was held as part of EOSC-ES-Prep, a project coordinated by the Aragon Health Sciences Institute (IACS) involving 22 Spanish institutions. Its aim is to prepare a joint proposal to enable Spain to join the EOSC Federation and connect national scientific capabilities with this European infrastructure.
THE NEXT STEPS FOR THE FUTURE SPANISH NODE
During the meeting, some of the project's next steps were defined, including the use cases to be handled by the future Spanish node, the selection of an exemplary case to demonstrate its potential, and the distribution of responsibilities among the institutions that will provide essential services.
The foundations were also laid for designing its governance model, which will need to address aspects such as co-financing, the addition of new entities and agreements between participants.
HEALTH DATA AMONG THE USE CASES
The IACS is leading one of the four use cases included in EOSC-ES-Prep, which focuses on the European Health Data Space. The aim is for biomedical researchers to be able to locate and analyze information and resources from different autonomous communities and European countries in an integrated way, while the data remain stored and under the control of the institutions responsible for them.
In Aragon's case, this work will make it possible to connect regional data spaces such as BIGAN with the future national environment and, subsequently, with other European infrastructures. The project also includes three other areas of application related to ocean health, the analysis of data from the Euclid space mission and the creation of comparable parliamentary corpora.
THE PROJECT WILL END IN NOVEMBER
EOSC-ES-Prep will conclude in November 2026, and a second document focused on the exemplary use case is expected to be presented that month. The proposal for the Spanish node to join the EOSC Federation is planned for a future call, likely in early 2027, although the date is still pending official confirmation. The European Open Science Cloud aims to facilitate the access, sharing and reuse of data, publications, infrastructure and other research resources by the scientific community across Europe.
