Comments to Jean-Claude Burgelman's article Politics and Open Science: How the European Open Science Cloud Became Reality (the Untold Story)

Abstract

Coming from an institute that was devoted to analysing data streams of different sorts from its beginning to understand how the human brain is processing language and how language is supporting cognition, building efficient data infrastructures of different scope was a key to research excellence. While first local infrastructures were sufficient, it became apparent in the 90s that local data would not be sufficient anymore to satisfy all research needs. It was a logical step to first take responsibilities in setting up the specific DOBES (Dokumentation bedrohter Sprachen) infrastructure focussing on languages of the world, then the communitywide CLARIN RI (European Research Infrastructure for Language Resources and Technology) and later the cross-disciplinary EUDAT data infrastructure [1,2,3]. Realising the huge heterogeneity in data practices, it was also a logical step to start the Research Data Alliance (RDA) [4] as a truly bottom-up initiative to discuss harmonisation across disciplines and across borders. On this background, determined by always looking for concrete results, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) process had Kafka-esc characteristics to me, despite the many interactions I had with EOSC key persons and other colleagues involved. Talking at a level where the technological core remained widely absent was difficult to do for me. Due to Jean-Claude Burgelman's (JCB) excellent paper I finally understood that excluding the discussions about the core was the only chance to get EOSC accepted. Of course, the discussions about the EOSC core would have to happen at a certain moment and obviously eternal types of disputes would determine these discussions. Therefore, the fallback on the analogy with Greek tragedies was an excellent idea by JCB.