Today EUDAT, the pan European collaborative data infrastructure announced that 16 major European research organizations and datacenters have signed an agreement to sustain the EUDAT – pan European collaborative data infrastructure for the next 10 years. The organizations stand together behind a long term sustainability plan and commit to develop, maintain and deploy pan-European research data services and to promote harmonization of research data management practices across centers.
EUDAT’s vision is data shared and preserved across borders and disciplines and its mission is to enable data stewardship within and between European research communities through this Collaborative Data Infrastructure, a common model and service infrastructure for managing data spanning all European research data centers and community data repositories. Conceived as a network of collaborating, cooperating centres, EUDAT combines the richness of numerous community-specific data repositories with the permanence and persistence of some of Europe’s largest scientific data and computing centers.
Service providers, both generic and thematic, and research communities have joined forces as part of a common framework for developing an interoperable layer of common data services. Known as the EUDAT Collaborative Data Infrastructure (CDI), this is essentially a European e-infrastructure of integrated data services and resources to support research. This infrastructure and its services have been developed in close collaboration with over 50 research communities spanning across many different scientific disciplines and involved at all stage of the design process. The establishment of the EUDAT CDI is timely with the imminent realization of the European Open Science Cloud which aims to offer open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data, across borders and scientific disciplines.
Researchers can rely on innovative data services to support their research collaboration and data management. Additionally they benefit from a common service management framework delivered by CDI service providers and the connection between sites. These 16 organizations from 11 countries with a further 4 in the process of joining, are European leaders in the deployment of data management and data infrastructure services. By joining the EUDAT CDI they are able to better serve their local customers across borders and support cross-national collaborations.
