CSC in the European EUDAT

The EUDAT membership allows CSC to offer its customers high quality data services based on EUDAT technology. EUDAT’s B2 product family helps researchers manage their research data. For service providers, the EUDAT consortium enables the sharing of work between different centers. For example, B2SHARE is owned by the CSC, which is responsible for both product development and future planning. Conversely, for example, B2DROP is owned and mainly developed by the German research center Jülich. All services are equally available to all EUDAT members. In addition to the services, EUDAT membership enables collaboration between the leading data experts in Europe, allowing everyone to develop their expertise and pass it on to their research community.

This collaboration also provides greater certainty for data preservation and continuity of services. A copy of the data can be created in another EUDAT centers, thus achieving geographical decentralisation of storage. Similarly, the continuity of services is more secure, as the entire service and/or the data stored there can be transferred to another centre in the event of an emergency.

EUDAT’s B2 family of products is part of the CSC service portfolio and offers organizations a free of charge option, as well as a range of customised solutions to meet their needs.

EUDAT recognises the FAIR principles and supports the sharing and re-use of open data through its services, while recognising that not all data is completely unrestricted. EUDAT supports European projects with its research data lifecycle services, promoting best practices in research data management and providing valuable experience and expertise.

The CSC is a founding member of EUDAT and one of the key drivers of EUDAT. CSC is strongly involved in the governance of EUDAT. Among the CSC staff, Antti Pursula, co-author of this blog series, heads the EUDAT Secretariat, Per Öster is EUDAT Council President and Damien Lecarpentier is a representative on the EUDAT Board. The CSC and the Dutch SURF own EUDAT Ltd, which as a company can contract and participate in EU projects on behalf of EUDAT.

European Open Science Cloud

Membership of EUDAT allows the CSC to contribute to the development of European research infrastructures. EUDAT wants to play a role in shaping European research data policies and developing interoperable services. Indeed, EUDAT is one of the main providers of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and is also involved in the governance of several projects, which also can help to promote national objectives. All EOSC services are also available to the Finnish research community.

EUDAT’s vision is to secure and share data across disciplines and geographical boundaries. Interoperability of services is key, not only between EUDAT’s own services, but also with a wide range of other data and computing services. In this way, Finnish data can be found in international services and, in turn, Finnish researchers can retrieve data for their own use. The EOSC is currently one of the main ways to promote this objective in Europe.

CSC has received funding for several EOSC-related projects, often through EUDAT membership. The EU funding aims to develop and maintain CSC’s services and, on the other hand, to increase our expertise in a wide range of research data management to better serve our Finnish customers.

EUDAT organizes events and webinars that Finnish researchers can benefit from. To find out about these, join the EUDAT mailing list or follow @eudat_eu on Twitter.EUDAT’s services include B2ACCESS, B2DROP, B2FIND, B2HANDLE, B2SAFE and B2SHARE. Read more about these in the EUDAT service catalogue.

Antti Pursula
The author is a development manager at CSC and head of secretariat of EUDAT consortium.

Tommi Kutilainen
The author has a few decades of experience in scicomm at CSCfi and he is especially interrested in everything. Twitter: @TommiKutilainen