Dear representatives of the European Commission,
Dear colleagues from the EOSC Association,
Dear Sophie Proust, executive director of the National programming agency for digital technology Agence de Programmes dans le numérique
Dear all,

I welcome you to this 5th national EOSC tripartite event in France, and I am happy that we host it this year at the DGRI, the General Direction for Research and Innovation of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research.
EOSC has been and continues to be a pillar of the digital transition in France. The aim is to create a seamless digital environment, in which European researchers can share data, services and use e-infrastructures to conduct innovative. This aligns to our strategy for digital services and e-infrastructures to further improve the digital environment for research in France, and with initiatives like Recherche Data Gouv to bring the competence of the FAIR data life cycle to the individual research groups. EOSC is also tightly connected to our national research infrastructure roadmap, of which an update will be presented by DGRI in 2026. EOSC is and remains not only an Open Science and FAIR-data topic, but also needs accompanying services and e-infrastructures.

With 30 research performing organisations being members or observers of the EOSC Association, France is strongly engaged in the EOSC. We welcome the building of the EOSC Federation, which will allow real-life research using FAIR data from all research domains together with innovative services and state-of-the-art computing and storage facilities. This is not only important in view of interdisciplinary research at European level, but through the Federation EOSC can become a high-quality data provider for AI driven research.


Data Terra and PaNOSC, are two of the first 13 nodes of the EOSC Federation. They are already providing innovative services to a wide community. We will learn today how these two French-led initiatives benefit from joining the Federation and what prospectives there are for other French actors, which are ready to contribute or lead thematic nodes.

With the next framework programme, which is under discussion at European level, the MESR supports a future performant EOSC ecosystem, in which the users and providers have a strong voice. At the same time, we have to find a sustainable business model, which takes into account the budgetary constraints. Co-funding, in which the member states and associated countries of Horizon Europe finance EOSC relevant activities together with the European Commission, is a promising approach to ensure that funding is in line with national priorities. The future governance model should be a tripartite one, where member states and associated countries, the European Commission and the research communities meet on equal terms. EOSC needs to be constructed in a coherent manner with strong links to the European digital landscape, including GÉANT, EuroHPC and the emerging European Data Spaces.

MESR has been and continues to be a reliable partner in evolving EOSC. The EOSC Federation will provide the necessary acceleration mechanism, to make this ecosystem ready to serve our research infrastructures, to provide the much needed high-quality data for AI based research, and thus support the research communities at large.

I wish you a fruitful conference and that through the presentations and discussions we take EOSC further into the future.