EOSC-ENTRUST has published an opinion paper highlighting the shared governance, policies and trust relationships needed to enable secure research using sensitive data across organisations, countries and research domains.
Europe is developing several federated data infrastructures, but differences in governance, access procedures and security assurances make it difficult for them to work together. The paper explains how the EOSC-ENTRUST Blueprint and Interoperability Framework provide a shared basis for establishing trust between providers of Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and enabling their participation in federated infrastructures.
Six strategic recommendations
The paper presents six strategic recommendations to support a more connected European ecosystem of TREs for sensitive data:
- Establish a European Trust Interoperability Framework across research and data infrastructures.
- Develop machine-readable governance and access policies.
- Create shared trust registries and standards for trust information.
- Test connections between infrastructures through projects addressing societal challenges.
- Establish a common federation standard for TREs.
- Design access procedures around researchers’ needs.
Connecting European initiatives
EOSC-ENTRUST’s outputs provide a practical foundation for a wider European trust framework. Its approaches to governance, interoperability and secure processing can contribute to connecting initiatives including EOSC, the European Health Data Space (EHDS), the 1+ Million Genomes (1+MG) infrastructure and other European Data Spaces, supporting secure research across infrastructure and national boundaries.
The paper also highlights the relevance of EOSC-ENTRUST outputs to the European AI Factories ecosystem, with the increasing importance of access to high-quality, sensitive research data in trustworthy AI development.
Read the opinion paper
The full opinion paper, Enabling European Trusted Research Environments: How EOSC-ENTRUST contributes to EOSC, EHDS and European Data Spaces and what remains to be done, is available on Zenodo.
Find out more
- Year two version of the EOSC-ENTRUST Blueprint and Interoperability Framework
- Year two version of the AAAI for TREs Blueprint
Posted: 9 October 2026
