EUDAT offers common data services, supporting multiple research communities as well as individuals, through a geographically distributed, resilient network of 35 European organisations (See EUDAT Partners). These shared services and storage resources are distributed across 15 European nations and data is stored alongside some of Europe’s most powerful supercomputers. Covering both access and deposit, from informal data sharing to long-term archiving, and addressing identification, discoverability and computability of both long-tail and big data, EUDAT’s services address the full lifecycle of research data.

In most research communities, there is a growing awareness that the “rising tide of data” will require new approaches to data management and that data preservation, access and sharing should be supported in a much better way. Data, and a fortiori Big Data, is a cross-cutting issue touching all research infrastructures.

One of the main ambitions of EUDAT is to bridge the gap between research infrastructures and e-Infrastructures through an active engagement strategy, using the communities that are in the consortium as EUDAT beacons and integrating others through innovative partnerships.