The European Commission has announced plans to create a European cloud storage service that will offer virtual infrastructure for Europe’s researchers and scientists.

Known as the European Open Science Cloud, the service will allow the storage and sharing of vaster quantities of data than ever before among European institutions and individuals. The service will initially be open to Europe’s scientific community, which according to commission estimates includes over 1.7 million researchers and 70 million science and technology professionals.

Commissioner for research, science and innovation Carlos Moedas spoke about how the new service would help to boost European science: “Our goal is to create a European Open Science Cloud to make science more efficient and productive and let millions of researchers share and analyse research data in a trusted environment across technologies, disciplines and borders. We listened to the scientific community’s plea for an infrastructure for open science and with this comprehensive plan we can get down to work. The benefits of open data for Europe’s science, economy and society will be enormous.”

The hope is that the Cloud will encourage broader access to reusable data, with the aim of streamlining research across disciplines and increasing European competitiveness. The commission intends to make all scientific data generated by Horizon 2020-funded projects open access by default starting in 2017, with further long-term goals also set.

The post Commission plans cloud storage service appeared first on Horizon 2020 Projects.