“NI4OS-Europe has set an example for the entire EOSC community on how to successfully build a federated ecosystem of services and communities by effectively including and empowering national and regional initiatives”

The impressive impact and outcomes of the NI4OS-Europe project have been acknowledged by the European Commission in the final project review report released on June 7th, 2023. NI4OS-Europe ran from September 2019 to March 2023 and it constitutes, as stated in the report, an exemplar of regional collaboration and an effective coordination management and effort. NI4OS-Europe built on a more than two decades collaboration and efforts in the Research & ICT fields in South East Europe and has enhanced the potential of the region, allowing for more actions to ensure sustainability and further development of its key exploitable results.

Thanks to the NI4OS-Europe collaborative activities and partners’ mutual support, 15 National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) have been established in all project countries, “an example to follow by other regions in Europe”. The report highlights NI4OS-Europe exceptional impact not only with regards to the implementation of Open Science and FAIR data within the region, but also with immediate major impact on the implementation of the EOSC service portfolio: with large % of the services available through the EOSC portal are those coming from the NI4OS-Europe region and onboarded during the project. A remarkable effort has been invested on training provision reaching out to 2130 people, with 1260 on capacity building events and 870 on end-user training events, with a very positive feedback, while the training materials developed and hosted by NI4OS-Europe have been made easily importable by the EOSC Training Catalogue, making the platform and training resources as sustainable in the future as possible. The success of the project community engagement strategies is reflected in a number of complementary activities: 23 national dissemination events, attended by over 1500 participants and NI4OS-Europe regional event attended by 200 participants, 25 scientific publications, the adoption of the EOSC promoters’ schema for the promotion of EOSC and FAIR uptake in the user communities, as well as the availability of resources to partners’ local languages to facilitate the uptake of the project outputs.

NI4OS-Europe outstanding performance and contribution is captured in the review report:

“The only recommendation is not for the project consortium, but for the key EOSC stakeholders to recognize the remarkable work of the project, and also to help sustain its Key Exploitable Results and regional efforts as such”.