Open Science is changing the way research is produced, shared and reused. At its core, it promotes a more transparent, collaborative and accessible scientific process, where knowledge, data and tools can be shared as early and as openly as possible. In the European context, this approach has become a central priority, especially under Horizon Europe, where open science is treated as a standard way of working in research and innovation.
The idea behind Open Science is simple: research becomes more valuable when it can be found, understood, verified and built upon by others. Open access to publications, the sharing of research data, and the use of digital and collaborative technologies all contribute to improving transparency, reproducibility and trust in science. At the same time, Open Science helps reduce duplication of effort and makes it easier for knowledge to circulate across disciplines, institutions and countries.
This is where the European Open Science Cloud, or EOSC, comes in. EOSC is Europe’s initiative to create an open and trusted environment where researchers and innovators can publish, find and reuse research data, tools and services across disciplines and borders. Its ambition has often been described as building a “Web of FAIR Data and Services” for science in Europe: a connected ecosystem designed to make research outputs more accessible, interoperable and reusable.
EOSC is not a single platform in the narrow sense, but a broader European ecosystem that brings together services, infrastructures, repositories and communities. Its objective is to support better science by aligning resources across Europe and making it easier for researchers to work with data and digital tools in a trusted environment.
However, one important challenge remains: not all research data can simply be opened and shared without restrictions. In many domains, especially those involving health, social sciences, demography or other sensitive information, researchers must balance openness with privacy, confidentiality and legal compliance. Traditional solutions such as safe rooms, safe havens or highly restricted access environments can protect data, but they may also limit accessibility, reproducibility and broader reuse.
This is precisely the space where EOSC-SIESTA contributes. The project was created to support the effective sharing and analysis of sensitive data within EOSC through a cloud-based approach. Its goal is to provide tools, services and methodologies that allow researchers to work with sensitive data in trusted environments, while still advancing the principles of Open Science and FAIR data. In other words, EOSC-SIESTA addresses one of the hardest questions in digital research today: how to make sensitive data usable for science without making it openly exposed.
To do this, EOSC-SIESTA develops reproducible and trusted cloud-based environments for managing and analysing sensitive data, together with user-friendly services that support secure data sharing and privacy-preserving workflows. These include secure infrastructures as well as anonymisation-related tools and methods that help researchers protect confidentiality while preserving research value. The project’s overall objective is to enhance EOSC services by demonstrating that FAIR principles can also be applied in contexts involving sensitive data.
Seen in this broader picture, Open Science is the vision, EOSC is the European ecosystem helping to make that vision operational, and EOSC-SIESTA is one of the projects working to ensure that sensitive data are not left out of that future. By building trusted, privacy-aware and reproducible environments, EOSC-SIESTA helps extend the benefits of Open Science to research areas where data cannot simply be made fully open, but can still be made usable, shareable and valuable under the right conditions.