OCRE is a landmark European project, as it coordinates – for the 1st time in Europe – the bulk procurement of Earth Observation (EO) services to answer the needs of the scientific community. True to its mission as the project establishing Open Clouds for Research Environments, OCRE is running a pan-European tender and establishing framework agreements with cloud service providers that meet the specific requirements of the research community, saving institutions the time-consuming and complex process of doing this themselves.

More specifically, it is expected that over 10,000 research and education institutions will be able to tap into these resources directly, with ready-to-use agreements via the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service catalogue. Furthermore, OCRE will make €9.5 million in service credits available to research institutions, via adoption funding from the European Commission. A significant portion of these € 9.5 million is dedicated to Earth Observation, where Evenflow and EARSC have been assisting with collecting the needs of the associated research community and subsequently engaging with appropriate EO providers on the EOSC.