Despite the tremendous progression on Digital Research Infrastructures in general and e-Infrastructures for research in particular there is still a need for a (distributed) Research Infrastructure, which enables top quality computer science on the development of digital infrastructures itself. Another interesting development related to the collaboration between industry and publicly funded e-Infrastructures concerns GAIA-XGAIA-X: A Federated Data Infrastructure for Europe
https://www.data-infrastructure.eu/GAIAX/Navigation/EN/Home/home.html This is a project initiated by Germany and France aiming to develop common requirements for a European Data Infrastructure. In September 2020, 22 companies and organisations – 11 from Germany and 11 from France as founding members – established an international non-profit association under Belgian law, the GAIA-X, European Association for Data and Cloud. The focus of GAIA-X is more industry oriented while EOSC is largely composed by public research organisations. The current collaboration opportunities and expectations between EOSC and GAIA-X are still unclear, although there are potential commonalities: both intend to create “a federated data infrastructure based on European values”. Common ground could emerge between GAIA-X and the next iteration of EOSC (serving industry) as described in the Fair Lady report.

The biggest challenges for the coming years will lie in further developing the EOSC concept into a working ecosystem, that serves the needs of the European research communities. These challenges broadly concern two levels: i) the interplay between generic and thematic e-Infrastructure service provisioning, and ii) the federation of institutional and national services up to the European level. Most of these challenges are organisational rather than technical.

The initial steps should lead to what is called a Minimum Viable EOSC, consisting of an EOSC Core, which should provide the functionality that is required to enable open science practices to occur across domains and countries according to the EOSC interoperability framework, the federated data and the EOSC Exchange, a digital marketplace that builds on the EOSC-Core to offer a progressively growing set of services exploiting FAIR data and encouraging its reuse by publicly funded researchers.

Many aspects need to be addressed among which the most important ones are: (i) implementation of this EOSC Core; (ii) definition of an architecture (Hardware and Software) that will allow to deploy new services; (iii) provide support and competences for turning to FAIR those data that are currently not compliant but are of interest for the scientific communities; (iv) create incentives for the researchers in making research data open and contribute to the creation of skills and careers in Data stewardship; (v) refine the sustainability and funding of EOSC with the correct mix of community support and business model.