Europe's science and research communities from a wide range of scientific fields are faced with increasingly large amounts of valuable data that stem from new sources such as powerful new sensors and scientific instruments used in analyses, experiments and observations as well as growing volumes of data from simulations and from the digitization of library resources while there is currently no comprehensive solution or framework that supports the necessary data management. In fact, the research communities from different disciplines have different ambitions and needs, particularly with respect to data organization and content management and no single solution is possible or perhaps even desirable. But these communities do also share basic service requirements and it is this commonality that the EUDAT project plans to exploit and provide a generic pan-European service infrastructure. Examples of EUDAT common services are the replication of data between trusted repositories, providing staging to HPC facilities and metadata catalogues for research data. EUDAT recognizes the heterogeneity of the research domain as one of its basic principles and will respect existing solutions from the different communities. The EUDAT consortium covers next to partners from a growing number of scientific disciplines also a large selection of strong computing and data centers that will provide technology and services.