The proactive sustainable management of scarce water across vulnerable agricultural areas of South Europe is a timely issue of major importance, especially under the recent challenges affecting complex water systems. The Basin District of Thessaly, Greece’s driest rural region, has a long history of multiple issues of an environmental, planning, economic or administrative nature, as well as a history of conflict. For the first time, the region’s key-stakeholders, including scientists and policymakers, participated in tactical meetings during the 19-month project “Water For Tomorrow”. The goal was to establish a common and holistic understanding of the problems, assess the lessons learned from the failures of the past and co-develop a list of policy recommendations, placing them in the broader context of sustainability. These refer to enhanced and transparent information, data, accountability, cooperation/communication among authorities and stakeholders, capacity building, new technologies and modernization of current practices, reasonable demand and supply management, flexible renewable energy portfolios and circular approaches, among others. This work has significant implications for the integrated water resources management of similar south-European cases, including the Third-Cycle of the River Basin Management Plans and the International Sustainability Agendas.

The Horizon 2020 project National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe—NI4OS Europe supports the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by integrating 15 countries in Southeast Europe into the governance structure of this new pan-European research environment. Through a qualitative secondary analysis of the data collected during the project, the paper focuses on the main instrument developed by the project with the aim of enabling the integration of the partner countries in the EOSC—a network of national Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs)—and explains how the concept of NOSCI and a wide range of related activities, tools, services, and resources foster research and open scholarly communication. The paper has three main sections: the first identifies challenges to scholarly communication in Southeast Europe, the second describes the methodology used to deal with these challenges revolving around the concept of NOSCI, whereas the third presents a set of indicators to track the change generated by project actions and discusses the impact of this methodology and project outputs in the area of scholarly communication.

The National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS Europe) project supports the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) by contributing to its portfolio of services, by involving national and regional research communities in the EOSC governance, by strengthening open science (OS) practices, and by promoting the FAIR principles (Macan et al., 2020; Garavelli et al., 2021) to help build the infrastructure and create a favourable environment for open and intensive scholarly communication. The main instrument in achieving this is the network of 15 national Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) established in the partner countries as national-level coalitions of Open Science stakeholders that have a prominent role and interest in the EOSC. The concept of NOSCI has been developed in response to the specific traits and challenges in the targeted region, based on complex and multilayered analyses of stakeholders, policies, and local contexts (Toli et al., 2020). Inclusive by nature, NOSCIs connect stakeholders from across the research lifecycle at the national level and provide not only a testbed for the formulation of OS policies but also a forum for knowledge dissemination and sharing. Drawing on a secondary analysis of the abundant data collected and materials produced during the project, this presentation focuses on the challenges identified as the NOSCIs were built – from data collection in the context of landscaping (Kosanović & Ševkušić, 2019) and policy analysis, through concept development, to implementation, testing, and verification (use cases). It highlights the relationship between individual challenges and NOSCI elements that address these challenges. The challenges are largely owed to diversities within the region, most notably the varying levels of integration into European structures (of the 15 partner countries, eight are not EU members), linguistic diversity, different research governance systems, policy traditions, and available funding. The framework for NOSCI development, the so-called blueprint (Toli et al., 2020), was designed in full recognition of these diversities. It relies on three modular workflows (Toli et al., 2021) and gives maximum flexibility to countries or national initiatives while making sure that all locally specific aspects are addressed. We believe that the approach adopted by the NI4OS-Europe team could be applied in other highlydiversified environments, as has been demonstrated by the NI4OS-Europe use cases, thanks to the flexible mechanism of interaction between challenges and responses underlying the very concept of NOSCI.