From 14 to 16 October, the EOSC Symposium will bring together around 500 specialists from Europe’s research and technology ecosystem to collectively advance the construction of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC).
At this landmark gathering, Fermín Serrano will take part as a speaker in the session on strategic partnerships with ERICs and ESFRIs, presenting the progress of the European project RIECS-Concept.
The EOSC Symposium is Europe’s leading annual meeting point for digital research infrastructure. Organised by the EOSC Association with the support of the EOSC Gravity project, the forum will bring together around 500 participants in Florence to network, exchange ideas and mark the latest progress on the EOSC and the EOSC Federation.
The EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) is the European initiative driving a federated ecosystem of infrastructures, data and services so that research produced in Europe is open, accessible and reusable in line with FAIR principles. The EOSC Federation is the mechanism through which institutions and infrastructures across Europe connect their resources within this shared ecosystem.
The official programme of the EOSC Symposium 2026 is organised around three main thematic tracks: strategic collaboration and future opportunities, best practices and user experience, and the operationalisation of the EOSC Federation itself. Key programme content includes the automation of data “FAIRification” processes, capacity building on the use of AI tools for data science, data sovereignty and governance in sectoral data spaces, and the design of sustainable business models for the long-term operation of the network’s nodes.
Ibercivis’s participation: citizen science in the official programme
Citizen and participatory science will hold a prominent place in the conference programme. Representing Fundación Ibercivis and the RIECS-Concept project, Fermín Serrano will speak in the session “EOSC and ERICs/ESFRIs” (Track 1: EOSC collaborations and future opportunities), chaired by Antje Keppler (EOSC Association / Euro-BioImaging ERIC) and Jan Hrušák (EOSC Steering Board).
- Date and time: Thursday 15 October, from 14:35, within the “Flash inputs from 1st wave Nodes, RIs and emerging communities” block.
- Title of the talk: “Citizen science as an emerging RI community: participatory governance and EOSC as a long-term institutional anchor.”
The session brings together ERICs, ESFRIs, thematic EOSC Nodes and emerging research communities to show how they can contribute interoperable, trusted services and cross-disciplinary collaboration to the EOSC Federation, and to identify shared opportunities and challenges around governance, access and data integration.
Building a European infrastructure for participatory science
Through the RIECS-Concept project, coordinated by Fundación Ibercivis together with the European Citizen Science Association (ECSA) under the Horizon Europe programme, work is underway on the conceptual design of the first pan-European research infrastructure for citizen science. The 36-month project brings together a consortium of 13 partners from 8 countries around three objectives: assessing the technical and scientific feasibility of this future infrastructure, developing a strategic roadmap for its implementation, and fostering an open and participatory governance model.
Connecting these participatory methodologies with the EOSC makes it possible to consolidate high-value scientific data in the three areas that RIECS-Concept takes as its field of work: environmental observation, health and climate change.
Information and registration
Registration and the detailed session programme are already available on the official symposium website.