PARTHENOS members who were attending the WP meetings and/or the Steering Committee in Pisa on the 8th November took part in a 90 minute workshop on the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The workshop was organised by the project to discuss some key questions on empowerment and services. Franco Niccolucci provided some relevant feedback from the EOSC survey which indicated that around 33% of the respondents had good knowledge of the FAIR principles, another 10% knew about them and 15% had limited knowledge of EOSC. Furthermore, Digital Humanities, Linguistic Studies and Cultural Heritage are considered to be in the tail of scientific users – possibly based on the assumption that researchers in the Humanities are not generating the Terabytes of data produced by CERN without any consideration of the wide diversity and cross-disciplinarity of data used in the Humanities and the ensuing need for detailed metadata.
The workshop then divided into two groups to consider a number of questions about how the Humanities could interact with the EOSC and the actions required to make this happen. The overall consensus was that the Humanities should be represented and PARTHENOS demonstrated aspects of what can be achieved. It was agreed that the project should set up a Task Force to take this forward consisting of key representatives from the Research Infrastructures involved in PARTHENOS. In summing up, Franco noted that the requirement to catalogue available services was already being done and regarding the different disciplines, that it was sometimes difficult to find common ground. PARTEHNOS has to focus on the common ground and find a way to make the best of this situation and consider focusing on this for the remaining time of the project. More detailed reports from the two group rapporteurs will be available shortly.