On 15 October, at the EOSC Symposium 2026 in Florence, we presented how we want to connect citizen science with the European Open Science Cloud through RIECS-Concept and EOSC-CSN.
The event brought together around 500 people from 35 countries, a few days after the EOSC Federation officially went into production.
Citizen science produces data, methods and services that matter to European research, but digital research infrastructures have been built with universities and research centres in mind. People who take part in a project without belonging to an academic institution find it hard to access them. That is what we went to Florence to talk about.
What EOSC is
EOSC, the European Open Science Cloud, is not a single cloud or one large data centre. It is a federation of nodes, run by institutions and communities, that share data, tools and scientific services under common rules. Gianluigi Consoli (Italy) summed it up during the Symposium in one sentence, “EOSC does not replace our research infrastructures. It connects them.”
The EOSC Federation has just officially gone into production. There are already 14 nodes in production offering 124 scientific services, and 28 nodes are in production or on their way. The second wave of node coordinators was also presented in Florence. As we announced, the Symposium is the annual meeting of the EOSC community, and this year it took place from 14 to 16 October at the Palazzo dei Congressi.
The presentation
In the session “EOSC and ERICs/ESFRIs”, Fermín Serrano, RIECS-Concept Coordinator, gave the talk “Citizen science as an emerging RI community: participatory governance and EOSC as a long-term institutional anchor”. He prepared it with Francisco Sanz, EOSC-CSN Coordinator, who was also in Florence.
The talk applied the ESFRI and EOSC models to citizen science. We propose a pan-European, long-term, public and federated capacity that provides resources and services to all citizen science actors in all domains. In it, citizen scientists are at the same time users, providers of resources and data, and part of the governance. That is why they can bring new users, new data and new services to the EOSC Federation, and why EOSC can be a long-term institutional anchor for citizen science.
We want excellence to be possible without erasing local or domain-specific strengths, citizen science to be recognised as a strategic and horizontal capacity in the European Research Area, decisions to be supported by high-quality, trusted citizen-generated data, and existing capacities to be connected and easier to reuse and sustain.
The work so far
RIECS-Concept (Horizon Europe, grant agreement No 101188210), which we coordinate at Ibercivis, is preparing a future pan-European research infrastructure for excellent citizen science. In the first phase, up to July 2026, we gathered the needs of citizen science communities through around 50 engagement activities and published the first RIECS catalogue. In the second phase, where we are now, we are repeating the exercise with other communities, including other research infrastructures, to analyse and prioritise. The technical feasibility study and the strategic plan are due in December 2027, and the aim is to apply to the ESFRI Roadmap in 2030 with the commitment of six to eight countries.
So far we have reviewed more than 700 papers and more than 4,400 technologies, and held 51 activities with more than 500 participants from more than ten countries and regions. This work has produced 823 user stories, 37 needs, 31 technical requirements, 151 catalogue components and 1,980 services, resources and functionalities.
Alongside it, EOSC-CSN (EOSC Citizen Science Node), a six-month project funded by EOSC Gravity that we coordinate with CIEMAT, Citizen Science Italia and Leiden University, on behalf of Citizen Science Nederland, has drawn up the Project Charter for a thematic citizen science node in the EOSC Federation, covering its governance, technical architecture and operational framework. EOSC Gravity has already validated it. In the model we presented in Florence, RIECS and EOSC-CSN form an intermediate layer between users, the citizen science ecosystem, and EOSC together with the research infrastructures.
Four use cases
The talk ended with four possible use cases, which we propose to design and pilot together with other research infrastructures and EOSC nodes.
- A research team launches a citizen science project in RIECS, which provides proven methods, tools and guidance and connects the project to EOSC resources.
- An existing citizen science project wants to make its data available through EOSC. RIECS validates the metadata, assesses readiness and makes the dataset discoverable in the EOSC Federation.
- Another research infrastructure needs citizen participation. RIECS provides citizen science services such as ethics, recruitment and participation, while the infrastructure keeps responsibility for the campaign and its data.
- A person with no institutional affiliation wants to use EOSC resources. They sign in to RIECS with an external identity and recognised citizen science organisations vouch for them. RIECS manages roles, and EOSC providers make the final access decisions.
The panel
After the talks, Fermín joined the session panel with Antje Keppler (EOSC Association and Euro-BioImaging ERIC), Marcus Povey (Instruct-ERIC), Özlem Yalçın Seyhan (KUTTAM, Koç University) and Vojtěch Bystrý (CEITEC MU). The discussion covered what it takes to become an EOSC node, where to focus effort in the Federation’s second year, and how new communities can join without creating unfunded expectations.
Our view is that citizen science is well placed to contribute capabilities and governance step by step, although the operational commitments the Federation requires are hard to meet for small organisations that rely mostly on project funding. To make EOSC usable for people without an institutional affiliation, we propose a federated trust model, in which trusted organisations verify the identity and affiliation of contributors close to their community, and that verification is recognised across the Federation, in a similar way to how eduGAIN works in academia.
We also believe we should build what is missing and federate what already works, rather than add more fragmentation. Fermín often compares it with high-performance computing thirty years ago, when many groups had their own computing resources, which gradually became part of coordinated national and European infrastructures such as PRACE.
We were not the only citizen science voice at the Symposium. In the EOSC Federation User Forum (“EOSC Federation User Forum: The voice of the research community”), Stephen Serjeant of the Open University spoke about citizen science communities.
More information is available on the RIECS-Concept and EOSC-CSN websites and in the official summary of the EOSC Symposium 2026.