Ronan Byrne, Deputy CEO and Chief Technical Officer at HEAnet (Ireland’s national education and research network), was appointed to the Board of Directors of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Association at the first General Assembly meeting in December 2020. The Board of Directors consists of eight members who serve for three, two, or one-year terms.
The EOSC was proposed in 2016 by the European Commission as part of the European Cloud Initiative to build a competitive data and knowledge economy in Europe. The EOSC will offer 1.7 million European researchers and 70 million professionals in science, technology, the humanities, and social sciences a virtual environment with open and seamless services for storage, management, analysis and re-use of research data across borders and scientific disciplines by federating existing scientific data infrastructures, currently dispersed across disciplines and the EU Member States.
The EOSC Governance structure is in transition as the original boards and working groups come to the end of term and the new EOSC Association is created. Ireland has been represented in the Governance structure to date by Mr. Byrne on the original Governing Board, UCD University Librarian John B. Howard (Sustainability working group), and DRI Director Natalie Harrower (FAIR working group).
Ronan Byrne said of his new appointment:
I am delighted to be elected as a member of the EOSC Association Board of Directors. I believe that the establishment of the EOSC Association and the advent of the EOSC Partnership is a most welcome and necessary development for open science, but also for European society generally.
I look forward to working collaboratively with its first President and the other Board Members to continue progress in the open science cloud space. We must continue to focus on this initiative which will further enable European scientists and researchers to tackle the grand challenges that we face in terms of climate, health, and societal wellbeing.
Ronan’s appointment follows the conclusion of his two-year term as Ireland’s representative on the EOSC Governance Board. Ronan leads strategy development at HEAnet – a key pillar of the new HEAnet Strategy 2020-21 relates to research engagement and progression on HEAnet’s national open science ambitions.
Ronan is also a member of Ireland’s National Open Research Forum (NORF) Steering Group, along with DRI Director Natalie Harrower and DRI National Open Research Coordinator Daniel Bangert. The role of NORF is to propose national actions to address the challenges of changing the Irish research system to strengthen, promote, or better support open research practices as outlined in the National Framework on the Transition to an Open Research Environment.
For more information on Ronan’s appointment to the EOSC Association Board, please see the HEAnet Press Release.
Outputs of the working groups shaping the EOSC are available from each group page, located here: https://www.eoscsecretariat.eu/eosc-working-groups
Also see the National Open Research Forum to monitor Ireland’s progress in Open Research.
