First edition of the EOSC Federation Handbook is released
The EOSC Association has led the community-wide co-creation of the Handbook on behalf of the EOSC Tripartite Governance, whose decisions govern its content. As the reference document for the EOSC Federation, the Handbook will help to guide the enrolment process of the first wave of EOSC Candidate Nodes and serves as a starting point for the Federation’s build-up phase.
A living document
The first draft was shared with the participants in the 17-18 March 2025 Workshop for the kick-off of the EOSC Federation build-up phase. This group of Candidates will lean heavily on the guidance provided in the Handbook and, in turn, contribute to reviewing and revising it.
The experiences of the Candidate EOSC Nodes during the first wave of the Federation’s build-up phase will be incorporated directly into an updated version of the Handbook to be developed in fall 2025.
A community effort
Led by EOSC-A, the EOSC Federation Handbook has been written collaboratively through weekly meetups and monthly review meetings facilitated by the editorial team of Andy Götz and Bob Jones of EOSC-A, and Miguel Rey Mazón (TU Graz) and Mark Dietrich (EGI Foundation) working in the context of EOSC Focus. Additionally, a host of volunteer writers and reviewers from across the EOSC community made contributions to the Handbook’s development.
A community consultation was held on the first three chapters in November 2024, and a full draft incorporating the consultation feedback was submitted to the EOSC Tripartite Governance in December 2024. This draft was also distributed to the participants in the EOSC Winter School on 20 January 2025. The Handbook writing team then consolidated the feedback from both the EOSC Tripartite Governance and the EOSC EU Node in order to converge on the Handbook’s first edition.
The EOSC Federation Handbook is published in the EOSC-A community on Zenodo and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) licence. The Handbook was created by humans, without any assistance from AI.
EOSC Beyond's role
EOSC Beyond actively contributed to shaping the EOSC Federation Handbook through the "EOSC Federation: Architecture and Federating Capabilities" concept paper, co-authored by Diego Scardaci (EGI Foundation), Mark Dietrich (EGI Foundation), and Paolo Manghi (OpenAIRE) with support from the project consortium. This document, downloaded over 2,000 times on Zenodo as of April 2025, outlined a vision for the EOSC Federation as a network of interoperable Nodes and introduced a detailed interaction model for collaborative service delivery.
Our exploration of Federating Capabilities and architectural principles served as a reference point during the Handbook’s development, with experts from research infrastructures, academia, and other communities reviewing and refining its core ideas. The paper’s influence grew through discussions with stakeholders at events like the EOSC Symposium 2024 and engagements with the European Commission, helping align the Handbook with shared priorities. Feedback from these interactions, alongside a community survey, will guide further refinements to the model in an updated paper expected in mid-2025. EOSC Beyond’s work thus provided conceptual groundwork and sparked critical dialogues that informed the Handbook’s approach to Federation-building, emphasising collaboration and technical interoperability.