OSCARS is a four-year EU-funded project that will foster the uptake of Open Science in Europe by consolidating the achievements of world-class European research infrastructures in the ESFRI roadmap and beyond into lasting interdisciplinary FAIR data services and working practices. The project will strengthen the role of the Science Clusters in the ERA by developing domain-based Competence Centres and by fostering the implementation of Open Science projects funded through a cascading grant mechanism.
To maintain the high-momentum achieved in these past years on FAIR data management and connecting research communities from all scientific domains to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), all Science Clusters are working together in the Horizon Europe OSCARS project, which has been granted ~25M EUR funding in the framework of the European Commission Horizon Europe call HORIZON-INFRA-2023-EOSC-01-01.
OSCARS brings together world-class European RIs in the ESFRI roadmap and beyond, and will be implemented in the next four years. Its first objective is to consolidate the achievements from the previous projects of the Science Clusters into lasting interdisciplinary FAIR data services and working practices. Moreover, the project will lead and foster the involvement of a broad range of research communities in EOSC by launching two Open Calls (in total worth at about 16 million Euro) for the development of new, innovative Open Science projects,
To increase data FAIRness, OSCARS will also further develop a FAIR-compliant certification scheme for research data, community-based science platforms embedded in the EOSC portal and providing access to FAIR data services, data sources, guidelines and training. It will, in addition, provide highly composable research-enabling services, as well as data processing and management solutions.
The implementation of the work has already started, based on a long-standing collaboration among all the science clusters, whose role in the European Research Area will be further strengthened, recognised, acknowledged and sustained for the future. It is expected that, through OSCARS, the advances in organisational models, as well as in sharing digital technologies and services for the benefit of all domains, will be further strengthened, and that there will be a widespread uptake of multidisciplinary Open Science practices in the different research communities and beyond.