Strengthening the potential of the EOSC for knowledge valorisation and industry-academia collaboration (EOSC Partnership)

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to the following outcomes:

• Better overview of the identified opportunities and barriers of the EU’s current legal framework on intellectual property (patents, copyright, licenses etc.) for researchers to valorise knowledge resources provided and/or processed in the EOSC Federation.

• Organisations contributing resources to the EOSC Federation have improved capacity, stronger incentives and better legal and technical conditions to valorise these knowledge resources and engage in open innovation practices and industry-academia collaboration.

• Organisations contributing to the EOSC Federation have clearer frameworks and incentives to offer their resources to innovators, deep-tech startups and startups emerging from academia.

• Organisations contributing to the EOSC Federation have established channels in EOSC to promote knowledge valorisation with the private sector, including SMEs and industry.

Scope:

This topic aims to support increasing and exploiting the potential of EOSC as a driver of innovation and a platform for researchers to develop new technologies and solutions that can be brought to the market.

Knowledge valorisation is one of the EU’s key priorities for the European Research Area, aiming to ensure that the increasing amount of research results generated in the EU, mostly with full or partial public funding, are transformed to products, services and solutions that benefit society and contribute to economic competitiveness.

Many initiatives have already been taken at EU level to boost knowledge valorisation, including the guiding principles, codes of practice and a platform to build a community to share experiences[1].

The EOSC Federation brings together and makes available to researchers, large volumes of knowledge resources, including data, publications, software, tools and services from different research and data infrastructures and scientific services providers across Europe. It therefore has the potential to facilitate and provide appropriate frameworks for knowledge valorisation, open innovation practices and industry-academia collaboration especially for what concerns results that stem from cross-discipline or cross-country research. Activities funded under this topic should aim to support the capacity of the EOSC Federation and its community to better valorise research results in line with the EU’s code of practice on intellectual assets management[2] and standardisation in the European Research Area[3].

A key element in this effort is to clarify the legal conditions to valorise knowledge resources, including resources provided in the EOSC Federation. As knowledge resources have various degrees of copyright protection, it is often challenging for researchers to navigate in what they are allowed to do with the knowledge resources and how they can be used in industry-academia collaboration. A better overview of requirements and more legal clarity will therefore incentivise researchers to valorise the knowledge resources of the EOSC Federation.

This effort should also take into account the specific needs of different research communities contributing to the EOSC Federation, ensuring they have the possibility to set better legal terms for knowledge valorisation through appropriate choice of licenses etc. More guidance is therefore needed to ensure that contributors can share their knowledge resources in the EOSC Federation with fewer legal strings attached.

Proposals under this topic should include the following activities:

• Analyse opportunities and barriers emerging from the provisions of the EU’s current legal framework on intellectual property and relevant types of licenses that set the legal conditions for researchers to valorise knowledge resources in EOSC Federation.

• Gather requirements and needs, develop and analyse potential business models and access schemes for innovators and start-ups in Europe to access and use resources available in the EOSC Federation.

• Develop a number of case studies of identified EOSC stakeholders valorising their results and/or establishing collaboration links with the private sector.

• Map out and evaluate the possibilities of relevant types of licenses for knowledge resources to facilitate knowledge valorisation and engage in open innovation and industry-academia collaboration.

• Organise workshops, webinars and awareness-raising campaigns, and develop guiding material targeted at EOSC users and communities contributing to EOSC on how to facilitate and engage in knowledge valorisation and industry-academia collaboration based on the knowledge resources of EOSC Federation.

• Develop recommendations and best practices, based also on the case studies, for further development of the EOSC Federation to facilitate knowledge valorisation and industry-academia collaboration.

To ensure complementarity with and use of the latest EU guidelines and research results, proposals should build on ongoing and previous Horizon Europe-funded projects, including IP4OS, EU guiding principles for knowledge valorisation, Knowledge Valorisation Platform and code of practice for intellectual property management and standards. This topic implements the co-programmed European Partnership for the European Open Science Cloud[4].

[1] https://research-and-innovation.ec.europa.eu/research-area/industrial-research-and-innovation/eu-valorisation-policy/knowledge-valorisation-platform

[2] http://data.europa.eu/eli/reco/2023/499/oj

[3] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reco/2023/498/oj

[4] https://eosc.eu/partnership/