Jessica Lindvall elected to the EOSC Association Board

EOSC (European Open Science Cloud) can be described as a digital collaboration platform aimed at creating a European system of tools and services to help researchers store, share, process, analyze, and reuse research data. The EOSC partnership has a tripartite governance: the European Commission, the EOSC-Steering Board and the EOSC Association. In Sweden, the Swedish Research Council promotes the Swedish involvement in the Association, and to represent the Swedish research system’s interests within the EOSC Association.

EOSC have recently launched the EOSC Federation where the vision is to put in place a system in Europe for researchers to find and access data and services for research and innovation. This “one-stop-shop” will help researchers store, share, process, analyse and reuse FAIR (Findable Accessible Interoperable Re-usable) research outputs within and across disciplines and borders. To date, 14 EOSC Nodes within the Federation have been launched.

Jessica Lindvall elected as the Swedish candidate

At the EOSC Association's 12th General Assembly on 10 December, three new directors were elected. Jessica Lindvall, Associate Professor in Bioinformatics at Stockholm University and SciLifeLab, was voted in for a 1-year term. Her candidacy was endorsed by Stockholm University, Vetenskapsrådet/Swedish Research Council, and Sveriges universitets- och högskoleförbund (SUHF).

We pose three questions to Jessica Lindvall:

What do you find most important to prioritize as a board member?

Ensuring that the EOSC Federation with its distributed Nodes will establish itself as not only a technical infrastructure but also as a people infrastructure. EOSC Federation needs to be a strong sociotechnical infrastructure, where people with its expertise and knowledge and technology, it's resources and services, are seamlessly integrated and connected across the Federation of Nodes.

What are the most important experiences you bring into this work?

I bring experience from both a researcher perspective as well as the research infrastructure perspective and these I believe are important to have in mind as a member of the board. The researcher is the end-user of the services and resources of the EOSC and research infrastructure experts are the people that builds (together with researchers) and puts the services to the EOSC “smörgåsbord” of resources.

My background and expertise building people infrastructures and ensuring the connection to the larger ecosystem is, I believe, cruicial at this point of the federation build-up. I have been more than 20 years being a researcher and in addition I been strategically and operationally working within the research infrastructure sphere, both on an European level as well as national.

I also care for capacity building and skills and believe the foundation of any organisation, besides the technological infrastructure, is to create a learning environment where capacity building and skills enhancement are key for any organisations´ sustainability and resilience.

What are you most looking forward to in the coming year as an EOSC-A board member?

I look forward adding skills, capacity building and ensuring that EOSC Federation with its national and thematic Nodes are built as sociotechnological infrastructures i.e where tech and people meet and are integrated. People such as the researchers are to use the services and resources and people such as the research infrastructure experts/staff are to build the services and support the services and community. Hence, the federation is made up by people that needs skills to utilise the “smörgåsbord” of what EOSC Federation of Nodes will offer. EOSC is a key for the transition of open science to happen in Europe and only together we make the transition happen.

Sweden’s longstanding engagement in Open Science

With the support of the Swedish EOSC members, the National Research Council and the national research infrastructures, the EOSC community of Sweden believes that Jessica Lindvall will be an excellent addition to the EOSC Association Board of Directors.

Read full article about the nomination on the SciLifeLab web

Learn more about Jessica in this short video from the EOSC Association

Read more on how Stockholm University works with Open Science