From 14 to 16 October, more than 500 participants from 35 countries met in Florence for the EOSC Symposium 2026, days after the EOSC Federation entered production. With 14 operational nodes offering 124 services, the European Open Science Cloud has moved from policy ambition to a functioning research infrastructure.
Day 1: Trustworthy data for trustworthy AIA central message: Europe’s AI ambitions depend not only on computing power, but on trusted, interoperable data. EOSC does not replace existing research infrastructures; it connects them. Keynote speaker Manuel Heitor called for radical innovation, urging the community to aggregate data around pressing societal challenges.
Day 2: From projects to sustainable services
Rosie Hicks (ARDC) argued for moving from short-lived projects to long-term products co-designed with researchers, treating digital infrastructure with the same commitment as physical facilities. Parallel tracks addressed interoperability, FAIRification, data sovereignty, user experience and sustainable business models.
Day 3: What kind of AI does science need?
Mercè Crosas (BSC, CODATA) described the twin demands of AI readiness: preparing data and infrastructure for AI, and preparing research communities to reflect critically on their norms and values. The panel discussed how principles of trusted data access can be extended from human users to algorithms.
Looking ahead
The challenge for the coming year: to show that researchers can answer questions with the EOSC Federation that they could not answer without it.
At DataGEMS, we share this commitment to making research data findable, interoperable and reusable, supporting researchers in an increasingly AI-driven landscape.
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