„Serving the user base“ was the theme of this year’s “Digital Infrastructure for Research” (DI4R) conference jointly organised by EOSC-hub, GÉANT, OpenAIRE and PRACE. It took place at ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon from October 8-11, 2019.

How to ensure that the infrastructures that are being developed as part of EU projects to realize the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) really serve the needs of the researchers who are supposed to use them? This question was a matter of lively debate at the DI4R conference. Many a conference speaker warned of a possible disconnect between the EOSC aspirations at the EU level and the users in their laboratories and library workplaces.

GO FAIR was represented at this conference with a poster explaining the initiative’s specific approach to implementing the EOSC: Building the European Open Science Cloud bottom-up based on Implementation Networks.

“Our approach especially resonated with conference participants who were actively working on FAIR solutions in their respective research domains but weren’t directly involved in any of the big EU projects or research infrastructures”, says Ines Drefs, International Advisor at the GO FAIR Support and Coordination Office. For these participants, the GO FAIR initiative seemed to represent a much welcomed opportunity to participate in shaping the kind of environment that the EOSC vision foresees – “a trusted, open environment for the scientific community for storing, sharing and re-using scientific data and results […] via a European Data Infrastructure” (p. 3, COM(2016)178 final).