A research infrastructure (RI) is an organisation that enables the research community to use specific facilities, resources and services in order to accelerate scientific achievements and promote sustainable research. Therefore, E-Infrastructures are RIs that address the needs of European researchers for digital services in terms of networking, computing and data management. They foster the emergence of Open Science and support the circulation of knowledge in Europe online and therefore constitute an essential building block for the European Research Area.
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) aims to be an environment for hosting and processing research data to support EU science. It envisages user communities from specific science domains that are organised to some extent and already have an e-infrastructure for their own community at their disposal with a portal and other services.
Unlike the E-Infrastructures (whose origins mostly comes from EU initiatives), the Science Mesh comes from a grassroots community of organisations, known as CS3 (Cloud Services for Synchronization and Sharing) running Enterprise File Syncing and Sharing (EFSS) services for their own users, who decided to offer added value to their users by federating their services.
