Comparison of federated solutions for distributed infrastructures

Federations are an effective mechanism for jointly contributing to a service offering, integrating resources provided by the different federation members. As the open science and the open innovation paradigms are increasingly pursued at the European level, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) has been envisaged as a federation of systems for creating a solution fully supporting the research data life cycle across borders and disciplines. This study analyses the federation approaches and solutions adopted by 11 of the major European federated research infrastructures (CLARIN, D4Science, EGI, ELIXIR, ENVRI, EPOS, Gaia-X, GEANT, GEOSS, OpenAIRE and PaNOSC) selected for their representativity following their service offering type and thematic area of expertise. A classification of federated and federating services is proposed in order to highlight the action areas that are to be considered when pursuing the creation of a federated infrastructure with the objective of enabling open science and open innovation.