The mission and vision of the NI4OS-Europe project lies in making a key contribution to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) service portfolio, in the engagement in EOSC governance and in ensuring inclusion at European level. To highlight the importance and timeliness of these contributions, the paper begins with a presentation of the project context by referring to relevant documents adopted at European level for the thematic areas of Open Science / Open Data and EOSC. The brief presentation of the concepts specific of these areas, and of some structures dedicated to their implementation facilitates the detailing of the main lines of action of the project which are focused on the pre-production infrastructure, services and repositories, and the involvement of user communities. The application domains related to generic and thematic services, as well as to data repositories are also highlighted. The end of the paper is dedicated to the approach of the project on the establishment of national OSC initiatives and to the presentation of the preliminary results obtained in this respect.