Secure research environments for the whole EU – Turku University of Applied Sciences participates in a new project

Increasing security threats and more detailed European and national regulations are driving the need for secure research environments. The current European environment is fragmented, resulting in a lack of interoperability of systems and methods, and challenges in accessing and managing services.

The international EOSC-ENTRUST project will build a European network of secure research environments and produce a common reference architecture to decentralise access to and analysis of sensitive research data. The Horizon Europe-funded project will build on two well-established research data infrastructures. One of the research data infrastructures will focus on supporting the exploitation of data sets for biomedical research and will be managed by ELIXIR, a networked multinational organisation. The other is EUDAT, which provides solutions for general research data management.

– We are delighted with the launch of EOSC-ENTRUST and look forward to working with both the European secure processing environment providers and the wider sensitive data community to deliver an interoperability framework to enable biomolecular and biomedical research,” said Peter Maccallum, ELIXIR’s Chief Technical Officer and project coordinator.

The project will bring together existing European providers of secure research environments and research organisations using their services. The project will create a common legal, organisational, technical and semantic framework for the services, based on the interoperability principles of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC), the European research data space.

– EOSC-ENTRUST brings together two major research data infrastructures, EUDAT and ELIXIR. By combining our experience and our international networks, we are able to meet the growing and multidisciplinary demand for secure processing environments. We will do this by organising Europe-wide coordination and common interfaces, involving key initiatives such as EOSC and other European data spaces,” says Yann Le Franc, Head of the EUDAT Secretariat.

The network of service providers will be expanded through targeted actions during the project. The project will also produce guidelines and recommendations to support the establishment of an operational network of secure processing environments as a permanent part of the EOSC.

Three partners from Finland

The Finnish partners in the project are the Centre for Science and Information Technology (CSC), Turku University of Applied Sciences and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL). The Health Technology Research Group of Turku University of Applied Sciences is mapping the requirements and will also participate in the evaluation and refinement of the reference architecture to be developed in the project.

– Our responsibilities in this project include leading the collection of requirements from company-generated research data, providing test data and formulating research questions for data analysis. This is why we are very grateful for the research cooperation with Eerikkilä Sports Academy, as they will enable the use of synthetic exercise data in the project,” says Elina Kontio, Research Goup Leader of the Health Technology Research Group at Turku University of Applied Sciences.

The National Institute for Health and Welfare brings the view of the provider and user of sensitive data, as well as its technical and semantic expertise to the project.

– Combining EHDS and EOSC environments is a future goal of the EU Data Strategy. Work has already begun to explore the possibilities and requirements in other projects in which THL is currently involved. Our work as part of the EOSC-ENTRUST consortium will generate concrete proposals on how to move towards infrastructures that support multidisciplinary health research,” says Persephone Doupi, THL’s Chief Medical Officer.

The EU-funded EOSC-ENTRUST project aims to improve European interoperability in accessing and analysing sensitive research data. The three-year project involves partners from 15 European countries and is led by the research data infrastructures ELIXIR and EUDAT. Turku University of Applied Sciences is one of the co-organisers of the project.

Original press release: Launch of EOSC-ENTRUST – driving European interoperability for sensitive data access and analysis

EOSC-ENTRUST

In EOSC-ENTRUST, we are creating a European network of secure research environments.

Find out more about the EOSC-ENTRUST project