Pre-Commercial Procurement: R&D As A Service For The European Open Science Cloud

The economical and contractual aspects linked to the production use of commercial cloud services are often overlooked in research environments in Europe, preventing researchers from reaping the full benefits of these services. Since 2016, CERN, in collaboration with leading European research institutes, has launched several projects to address this problem. The preparation and execution phases of these projects have revealed key lessons in procuring commercial cloud resources for research environments in Europe. These lessons can help shape the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) [1].