The 2023 annual symposium of the European Open Science Cloud took place 20 – 22 September in Madrid, hosted by the Spanish Presidency. Every year, this event celebrates an important networking occasion and exchange between stakeholders from ministries, research organisations, service providers, research infrastructures and research communities driving the development of and the engagement with the European Open Science Cloud. EOSC4Cancer was also an active contributor to this year’s programme by presenting at two sessions, about EU Missions and Trusted Research Environments, as well as by engaging with interested stakeholders at our exhibition booth using the interactive and eco-friendly EOSC4Cancer fortune teller game.

From EOSC4Cancer, representatives from Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, ELIXIR, EATRIS, empirica, University of Freiburg, Health RI and many more attended the symposium. In the speaking session “EOSC contribution to the EU Missions”, coordinator, Salvador Capella Gutierrez explored collaboration with other mission projects from the field of smart cities, soil, climate change and ocean and discussed how the different parts of the European Open Science Cloud are becoming a critical asset for research communities and decision makers to tackle the priorities identified in the Missions. Other contributions came from Blue-Cloud 2026, BY-COVID project and the FNS-Cloud. Speakers highlighted that it is crucial to combine the EOSC framework with domain knowledge but at the same time there is a need for the specific scientific domains to open up and look beyond their own field. Cancer prevention goes hand in hand with promoting healthy urban lifestyle, pollution reduction in our oceans or cleaner air, advocating for reduced chemical soil and food contamination. Similarly, the open science clouds should also seek synergies to provide stronger and more comprehensive evidence for policy-maker and the broader communities. Producing Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable data is not obvious in all scientific domains but the right incentives could greatly enhance data sharing and therefore drive open science-based research and evidence-informed policy-making forward. Last, but not least of all, the involvement of wider stakeholder communities is fundamental to successfully establish open science clouds which can contribute to solutions to the mission challenges (link to session slides and session recording).

Another highlight of the Symposium from EOSC4Cancer’s point of view was the discussion about Trusted Research Environments which are highly relevant for sensitive data use cases such as human health data. What Trusted Research Environments need are data governance, legal framework and technical solutions for security. These were the cornerstones of the session where Salvador Capella Gutierrez  presented the Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (Federated EGA). Federated EGA strives to support the discovery of and secure access to human data globally, while respecting national data protection regulations, with the goal of accelerating disease research and understanding and improving human health (link to session slides and session recording).

EOSC4Cancer was also mentioned as a high-impact project within the EOSC universe in other parts of the programme..