EU-wide Advantages & Opportunities for "Data Stewards, Skills and Training for Open Science and FAIR Practices" (HORIZON-INFRA-2025-01-EOSC-04)

1. Single Market Access

• Pan-European skills marketplace: A harmonised data-steward curriculum becomes an instantly recognisable standard for >2 000 universities and 40 000 research-performing organisations, facilitating labour mobility and rapid recruitment across the 450 million-consumer single market.

• Uniform service offering for EOSC users: Certified data stewards can offer cross-border data curation, consultancy and training services to SMEs, startups and public bodies working in health, climate, AI and other data-intensive sectors, widening commercial and societal uptake of FAIR data.

2. Cross-Border Collaboration

• Multinational consortia: The call explicitly requires cooperation with existing competence centres (e.g. Skills4EOSC nodes). This fosters joint curricula development with shared facilities, lowering duplication and spreading best practice between Northern, Southern, Eastern and Western EU research cultures.

• Mobility & exchange programmes: A common skills framework eases Erasmus+/MSCA exchanges for data stewards and researchers, accelerating knowledge flow while creating new business models for European training providers.

3. EU Policy Alignment

• Digital Europe & European Data Strategy: Structured data-steward training underpins the Common European Data Spaces (health, manufacturing, green deal) by ensuring datasets are FAIR-ready and interoperable.

• European Research Area (ERA): The project operationalises ERA Policy Agenda Action 8 (Research Careers) and Action 15 (Open Science), demonstrating concrete delivery of policy commitments.

• Green Deal & Twin Transition: FAIR data skills enable reproducible environmental research and industrial decarbonisation use-cases, supporting the green and digital twin transitions simultaneously.

4. Regulatory Harmonisation

• Consistency with GDPR, Data Governance Act & AI Act: EU-wide curricula embed legal-ethical modules, reducing compliance costs and legal uncertainty for institutions operating in multiple jurisdictions.

• CoARA-aligned assessment: By integrating CoARA principles, the project helps converge research assessment criteria EU-wide, making open-science contributions count equally in all Member States.

5. Innovation Ecosystem & Research Excellence

• Leveraging Europe’s 600+ research infrastructures: Trained stewards plug directly into ESFRI facilities and thematic clouds (e.g. ELIXIR, EuroBioImaging), raising data quality and accelerating discoveries.

• Synergy with EIT Knowledge & Innovation Communities: Harmonised skills profiles provide KICs with talent for data-driven entrepreneurship, boosting Europe’s competitiveness in AI, biotech and climate tech.

6. Funding Synergies

• Structural Funds & Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF): Less-research-intensive regions can co-finance local competence centres, closing the East-West skills gap.

• Digital Europe Programme: Certified training modules can be packaged into DEP Advanced Digital Skills projects, unlocking extra grant streams.

• ERASMUS+ Micro-credentials: Output curricula can be turned into stackable micro-credentials, funded under the European Universities Initiative.

7. Scale & Impact Potential

• Critical mass: With a single action, the EU can seed a pool of 10 000+ trained data stewards by 2030—impossible for any individual Member State.

• Economies of scale: Shared MOOCs, repositories and assessment tools lower per-learner costs, maximising the lump-sum budget efficiency.

• Network effects: Every additional competence centre increases value for all EOSC users through better coverage of domains and languages.

8. Strategic Value Proposition at EU Level

• Global standard-setter: A unified European curriculum positions the EU as the de-facto leader in professionalising data stewardship, influencing ISO, RDA and G7 Open Science dialogues.

• Talent retention & attraction: Clear, EU-wide career paths reduce brain drain and attract international experts to Europe’s research ecosystem.

• Integrated innovation pipeline: From fundamental research (Horizon Europe) through market uptake (DEP, EIC) to societal deployment (Cohesion Policy), the action creates seamless pathways for FAIR data exploitation.

Bottom line: Operating at EU scale transforms fragmented national training efforts into a coherent, policy-aligned, innovation-driven system that amplifies the impact of Open Science and FAIR practices across all Member States and disciplines.