A European Network of TRUSTed research environments

EOSC-ENTRUST is a 3 year Horizon Europe project (Trusted environments for sensitive data management in EOSC) led by ELIXIR.

The mission of EOSC-ENTRUST is to create a European network of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) for sensitive data and to drive European interoperability by joint development of a common blueprint for federated data access and analysis.

Countries and institutions have made significant investments in secure and trusted data environments to meet the need for research and policy-driven analysis of sensitive datasets such as people’s health and socio-economic status, the habitats of vulnerable species and geo-spatial locations of protected sites. There are now a large number of such secure environments in operation – linked to national centres, individual organisations or specific research communities. This fragmented landscape poses challenges for both users and providers: researchers are faced with a large number of different systems and access procedures; providers need to manage federated access across multiple, potentially incompatible, technology and governance frameworks.

EOSC-ENTRUST brings together providers of operational TREs from 15 European countries with a shared goal to implement, validate and promote their capabilities through a common European framework using shared standards and common legal, operational and technical language. This blueprint for interoperability is anchored in the EOSC Interoperability Framework spanning the four dimensions of Legal, Organisational, Technical and Semantic interoperability.

EOSC-ENTRUST has identified four driver projects covering Genomics, Clinical trials, Social science, and public-private partnerships to benchmark capabilities, inform blueprint design and demonstrate secure data analysis using federated workflows:

• Genome Data Infrastructure (GDI) & Federated EGA (FEGA) – Federated Human Genomics as a catalyst for European TRE provision
• Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA) & The International Secure Data Facility Professionals Network (ISDFPN) – Common standards to enable trans-national sharing of administrative/register and social science data
• European Clinical Research Infrastructure Network (ECRIN) & University of Oslo – Enabling secure transnational re-use of clinical research data in a legally and ethically compliant manner
• Public-Private interactions between TRE in health and environmental data

Targeted outreach activities will expand this open network with further providers and develop policy papers and guidelines for the full range of stakeholders to create a long-term operational TRE framework within the European Open Science Cloud.

Objectives

1. Create a European network of Trusted Research Environments, linked to EOSC and EuroHPC, to enable transnational collaborative research on sensitive or restricted data.
2. Trusted Research Environment providers implement, validate, and promote their capabilities through a European framework using common standards and shared legal, operational and technical language.
3. National funders and governments understand the network of TRE capabilities serving their needs, and how TREs support their national priorities and their contributions to selected transnational programmes.
4. The European Network of Trusted Research Environments (ENTRUST) is embedded in the European Open Science Cloud and the European Data Spaces and fosters an ecosystem of public, private and joint-venture providers of TRE services.

ELIXIR Belgium contributes to sharing know-how on the technologies developed in Belgium to support the creation of a European blueprint on TREs functioning and how they can be integrated into the EOSC portal.

Read more on the EOSC-ENTRUST website.