26 May 2026
A cascading grant from EOSC Gravity, the Horizon Europe project supporting the development of national EOSC nodes across Europe, has been awarded to a small Irish consortium to draft the formal EOSC Ireland Node Charter. The project runs for approximately six months with a budget of ~€50,000, with the specific objective of producing the governance document that will define how the EOSC Ireland Node operates as part of the wider EOSC Federation.
The Node Charter will establish the governance principles, membership conditions, service obligations, and sustainability framework for Ireland's EOSC Node. It is the foundational institutional document that gives the node formal standing within the European network and provides a shared framework for partners, funders, and the broader EOSC community as Ireland's engagement with the ecosystem develops.
Charter Development Partners
Prof. Aedín Culhane lab: interoperability, life science standards, and use case expertise
Technical architecture and national HPC/cloud infrastructure expertise
EOSC Association Ireland Representative: governance, EOSC policy alignment, and federation strategy
ELIXIR Ireland's contribution
ELIXIR Ireland's involvement comes through the Culhane lab at the University of Limerick, contributing life science domain expertise in interoperability, metadata standards, and use case requirements to the charter drafting process. This connects directly to the work underway in WP4 of the main EOSC Ireland project, where the UL team is leading on connecting Irish research assets to the EOSC Federation.
ELIXIR Ireland's participation in this charter work reflects its commitment to ensuring that life science data perspectives, including experience with FAIR data principles, federated access, and research software standards, are considered as part of the governance planning process.
The EOSC Gravity grant complements the main EOSC Ireland project by ensuring that, alongside the technical and service planning work, Ireland also develops the formal institutional foundations needed to operate a credible, well-governed node within the European network.
