Project remains complicated and distracted by politics, warns Jean-Claude Burgelman
An EU-backed initiative to facilitate the opening up of research data is still hamstrung by problems with its setup and struggling with the need to play politics, according to the European Commission’s former lead on the project.
Jean-Claude Burgelman (pictured), now a professor of open science policy at the Free University of Brussels, led the development of the European Open Science Cloud over the final five years of a two-decade career at the Commission that included stints as its head of open data and its open-access envoy.
The EOSC is being set up to provide a portal for the hosting and analysis of data generated by European research projects, but it has been beset by early teething problems.
Burgelman spoke to Research Professional News in the days after the EOSC executive board published a report slamming the initiative’s early governance setup as being confusing and lacking coordination, and after publishing his own account of the EOSC’s development.
Although issues with governance are “much better” since a non-profit association was established in July 2020 to give the research community a stronger hand in the project, he says, “I don’t think all the problems are gone.”
Part of the issue, he believes, is that a plethora of bodies remain involved in EOSC governance as work continues to enable the EU to fund it via the bloc’s 2021-27 R&D programme, Horizon Europe.
“You have the association, the board representing the member states, the board that has to do the partnership, the programme committees deciding on Horizon Europe where the budgets for EOSC are–it’s not very simple,” Burgelman said.
He is part of the general assembly of the association and warned that it “still does not have the instruments it needs to make EOSC implementable very quickly”, because it is not in charge of the budget.
He said the EOSC “should be up and running, albeit incomplete, by the summer”.
Overseas servers
Getting the project going is important, he says, as “several universities” are already sending research data to servers hosted in foreign countries.
This is controversial with some, due to fears about exactly who controls such data.
“There is still no formal authority, no accountable organisation, no liability” at European level as yet, said Burgelman.
He believes foreign companies should only be able to provide hosting services as long as researchers can control how their data are used. He wants funders to require researchers to share and analyse their data in ways that will be compatible with the EOSC.
But the service itself needs to be available first. “There is a bit of a vicious circle there.”
Familiar problems
Burgelman sees two underlying causes of the EOSC’s problems, which he said are common to many EU technology initiatives: over-promising and having to play politics.
The EOSC started out with a limited scope to facilitate the sharing of research data and analysis, he said, and “it was already very complicated to get scientists to agree”.
But that became more complicated as “gradually we were told that the EOSC must also help industry, must also bridge the gap between regions, and this and that”.
On the political side, “We have a long history in Europe of being first with the bright ideas which then fall flat because it’s very difficult to find the balance between multinational politics and output-driven performance. In Europe our big technology projects are always fighting this tension between delivering the good idea and making sure everyone is pleased.”