Academic authors; infrastructure and research communities; publishers and content providers; libraries

Scholarly communication; Open Access monographs; Library subscriptions; Membership models

Collective funding models, Open Science Infrastructure, Sustaining OSis, Sustainability

We present the work of Liverpool University Press and the Central European University Press who have, with assistance from the COPIM Project, launched an innovative revenue model this year to fund open access monographs. Building on existing library subscription models, their membership programmes give libraries access to highly-regarded backlist eBooks, with the membership fees then used to publish new frontlist monographs that will be OA for anyone in the world to read.

As the reality of Covid-19 dawned early in 2020 and campuses worldwide went into lockdown, publishers rushed to temporarily open their publications by removing paywalls. Usage of eBooks soared. It seems clear there is an opportunity to reassess scholarly monograph publishing. Given the current global library environment and budget pressures exacerbated by Covid, a consortial model of funding promises a cost-effective solution for OA that means no single institution bears a disproportionate burden. This model appeals to both those libraries that wish to pay for subscription-access content (i.e. traditional university acquisition models), and those libraries that are in a position to support OA initiatives. It brings many institutions together under one roof for an affordable route to open access books.

We call this transformational scheme Opening the Future and its aim is to make library funds go further: achieving the dual objectives of increasing library digital collections while also supporting open access. As a pilot with COPIM it is a small-scale trial for how small- to medium-sized traditional university presses might convert to a low-risk and sustainable OA model. COPIM is documenting these publisher case studies to create a free toolkit, codebase and roadmap for other presses considering going OA.

Policy makers and funders, research communities, libraries, research support services, research-performing organisations, EOSC

Competence centers: models, integration and coordination, Sharing best practices and knowledge, Skills within the wider research context, Sustaining open science training: people, resources, governance

Data stewardship in Austria, postgraduate certificate data steward, data stewardship training, open science training

Data-driven research is growing exponentially. In order to support researchers with the proper management of their data, 500.000 data stewards will need to be trained in the EU alone. The first professional data stewards in Austria (e.g., at the TU Graz) had to acquire their skills and knowledge while “learning on the job”. As there is currently no dedicated training for data stewards in Austria, the Vienna University Library in cooperation with the FAIR Data Austria project currently develops the first postgraduate certificate for data stewards.

With regard to the tasks of data stewards (especially the support of researchers, information transfer and research data management (RDM) training, as well as requirements engineering), the course will include the basics of RDM, open science, data science, coding and teaching skills. The course will be practice-oriented and allow the students to learn not only from national and international experts on data stewardship and RDM but also benefit from transdisciplinary exchange among the participants themselves. The course will be offered part-time and in a hybrid format as a way for RPOs to upskill current research support staff as well as offer an alternative career path for researchers. Data Stewardship experts on the national and international level have given feedback on the preliminary curriculum in three workshop in July 2021.

Research institutions worldwide are developing data stewardship training to meet the growing demand. As the first formalized further education program in Austria, this lightning talk on the postgraduate certificate “Data Steward” from the Vienna University Library is sure to spark discussion on the topic of data stewardship training and contribute to the global efforts regarding Open Science education. The talk should serve as an example of possible collaborative efforts to implement high-quality certified data stewardship training on the national level.

Researchers and research communities; non-academic employers; PhD educators, PhD Students

Training and skills for open science
Skills within the wider research context

Engaged Research, co-design, PhD Training

“Engaged research” encompasses the many ways that researchers meaningfully interact or collaborate with diverse stakeholders in any or all stages of a research process. An EU-funded project, “Opening Doors”, employed an engaged research approach in the co-design of an open, online educational course in open science and open innovation for early career researchers (ECRs). The goal of the “Opening Doors” project is to shape more innovative, socially aware, integrative ECRs, ready to meet the challenges of the future. It is expected that participants on the “Opening Doors” educational course will develop competencies that are valued in open innovation networks, enabling them to thrive in complex knowledge networks and enhancing their contribution to both academic and non-academic environments. The co-design of the course was a three-stage process: 1) stakeholder interviews were undertaken in Ireland, Denmark and the Czech Republic with PhD graduates, PhD students, PhD employers (academic and non-academic) and PhD educators, to understand what skills and attitudes are valued for promoting open, innovative and impactful research; 2) a co-design workshop was then created which took the form of an online “world-café” event with diverse stakeholders; 3) a final “industry check” was undertaken with employers to ensure that this training for ECRs is ‘fit-for-purpose’ in terms of supporting the development of skills and attitudes that are valued in open science and open innovation environments, and to verify the validity of our engaged research approach. This approach resulted in a comprehensive and nuanced understanding of open science and open innovation that we believe will, in turn, lead to meaningful societal engagement. The predominant themes that emerged from this work include the importance of accessible, relevant communication with research audiences outside of one’s discipline and crucially, non-academic audiences - where an open mindset and an attitude of curiosity and mutual respect is key.

Trainers, researchers, EOSC, research data managers

Assessment frameworks for trainers and researchers, Competence centers: models, integration and coordination, Skills within the wider research context, Sustaining open science training: people, resources, governance

train-the-trainer, best practices, open science, EOSC, FAIR

EOSC Synergy offers a wide range of practical tools for the research community and trainers. It is the goal of the project team to contribute to sustaining open science practices and strengthening skills for better science. The objective of the lightning talk is to showcase the training materials and resources and inspire trainers to use them for their training activities.

In line with the above, the lightning talk will give a preview of the train-the-trainer online course developed to support trainers in creating online teaching and learning materials using best practices following EOSC Synergy’s assurance guidelines. Topics, such as online learning design, learning activities, content format, delivery and tools are covered in the course and will be briefly introduced during the talk.

The second demonstration will include an introductory online course on Open Science, EOSC and research data management. This course was developed as an example material, and it can be reused for training purposes. The distinctive advantage of the course is showcasing the practical benefits of the European Open Science Cloud and related initiatives. 

EOSC Synergy has the goal to expand the capacity and capabilities of EOSC by leveraging the experience, effort and resources of national publicly-funded digital infrastructures. In particular it develops a new channel to support the build up of EOSC human capabilities. Training and skills makes part of the project’s broader work towards achieving the main goal.

repository managers, researchers, librarians, research communities

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Training and skills for open science

Repositories, training, skills, Open Science, librarians

The talk presents a concept of Open Science-related training developed with the aim of facilitating the adoption of institutional repositories in a specific local context (Serbia). This context is marked by a considerable delay in infrastructure development, the lack of institutionalized training on Open Science, a knowledge gap, and insufficient library staff. Although institutionalized training is indispensable in the long-term, this example shows that a combination of bottom-up approaches and highly customized and informal training can increase the Open Science capacity of researchers, librarians and even institutions, which is highly relevant in the context of building competence and capabilities for EOSC. In these terms, it may be instructive for other environments with poor formal training on Open Science.

The adoption of the Open Science Platform (the national OS policy) in 2018, spurred the development of institutional repositories in Serbia and the leading role in this process has been taken by the University of Belgrade Computer Centre (RCUB). Before the adoption of the OS Platform, training on OS was mainly provided through international projects. The official Library and Information Science curriculum,Librarian Licensure Examination programme, and professional development courses for librarians and training programmes offered by university libraries did not address OS-related skills, due to which there was a knowledge gap in the library and research communities, and this threatened the adoption of the developing infrastructure.

To overcome this, the University of Belgrade Computer Centre decided to include training (for repository managers and end users), along with software, hosting, and technical support, in the service package offered to institutions. A dedicated user support team responsible for designing and implementing training was established. The training programme covers a range of topics beyond repository features and workflows: Open Access policies, FAIR principles, metadata standards, copyright, self-archiving policies, altmetrics, dissemination through metadata harvesting, discovery platforms (OpenAIRE, BASE, CORE), using institutional repositories in the context of Research Data Management and cultural heritage. Training formats include predefined lectures and webinars, but also highly customized sessions and informal consultations.

As a result, dozens of repository managers (mainly librarians) and hundreds of end users (researchers) have been trained so far. A number of trained repository managers have already started organizing training on various OS topics at their institutions. Together with the user support team, they form a strong network enabling dynamic information exchange. At the same time, there is a growing interest among researchers for additional training on particular OS topics (RDM, copyright, integration of the repository in various institutional workflows). Also, continuous and flexible support encourages content diversity in repositories. The concept of training developed by the RCUB user support team has so far proven to be efficient in mitigating the lack of institutionalized training. However, in order to provide full support for all aspects of Open Science (esp. RDM and citizen science), it will be necessary to establish institutionalized training.

This talk is targeted primarily to all those people involved at various levels in the design, implementation and evaluation of Data Management Plans (DMP) in the context of research studies. The audience may include, among others, principal investigators, data stewards, IT people, funders, etc.

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sharing best practices and knowledge, RDM best practices

Data Management Plan, DMP, Guidelines, FAIR, RDM Best Practices, Data Stewardship

The preparation and implementation of a good Data Management Plan (DMP) helps to focus on different aspects of research data management (like ethical-legal or technological requiremenresources involved, FAIRness) thereby fostering potential benefits for data analysis anrepurposing. However, preparing a good DMP is often a complex task. A number of existing tools tries to simplify the preparation by automatically generating a DMP from a set of questions, but the difficulties in tailoring predefined plans to specific use cases sometimes lead to the compilation of not exhaustive documentation, especially for those who are new to this task. To alleviate these challenges we have created a guide to support the writing of the DMP, combining key contenpractical recommendations and references extracted from the most common DMP models. Wstructured the guidelines as a complement to the analysed templates and tools to stimularesearchers towards a critical exploration of the many different aspects, possibly adapting them their domain specificities. In this way, we believe that the whole project team could be encouragto consider the DMP as a travelogue to be followed over the project lifecycle and further, updating it whenever necessary. The guide is openly available on Zenodo and it is currently being validated by the researchers of the I FAIR Program – an initiative to promote and adopt best practices fresearch data management in the biomedical research community in Sardinia. The initial feedback indicates that the guide appears to be a useful tool both when creating the DMP and during revision.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and research communities, repository managers, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, service providers and innovators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and FAIR data

Overlay journals ; Open repositories ; Interoperability ; OA Diamond journals

Episciences is a platform to publish diamond open access overlay journals.

It offers an alternative to the monolithic system of scientific publication dominated by private publishers. The ambition is to provide the scientific communities with the technical means to produce high quality journals, at an efficient cost, compliant by design with FAIR principles, by relying on open archives and repositories in general (arXiv ; Zenodo ; HAL ; CWI). The mechanism implemented is simple: the submission of an article to a journal is done by a prior deposit in an open archive. The article is freely accessible and therefore consultable by all, whether or not it is accepted by the journal.

Episciences contributes to the development of bibliodiversity by supporting an alternative path to the conventional model of scientific publication. The editorial process is based on a convergence of the stages of qualification, certification and dissemination and a system for recording the different versions of a document (the preprint reviewed, revised, accepted for publication, the new version, the published article are all "record of version"). Thus the value chain is no longer limited to the only reference version which is the published article ("version of record").

The platform is currently being integrated in the OpenAIRE service catalogue and the EOSC portal thanks to the OpenAIRE Nexus project.

Episciences is tightly coupled with open repositories and will soon leverage the COAR Notify project to enhance overlay journals’s interoperability with open repositories. Based on recommendations of Notify Project, the journals will be able to exchange notifications with open repositories. For instance authors will be able to submit their preprint to a journal right after their submission on a preprint server ; the preprint servers will be able to be notified when a preprint has been endorsed and published by a journal.

Libraries, research administrators, Open Science Infrastructure providers, funders

Innovations in publishing and research dissemination

Open access books, Open Licensing, Open Metadata, FAIR Metadata, Open Tools, Open Scholarly Communications

The COPIM project (Community-led Publication Infrastructure for Monographs) is building community-owned, open systems and infrastructures to enable open access book publishing to flourish. As part of this effort, COPIM is developing Thoth, a database currently in beta that assists open access book publishers in managing their metadata.

During this session, we will share more about Thoth’s journey so far, covering four initial use-cases that may be relevant for the Open Science community:

Publisher metadata management system – System to manage openly-licensed, standards-compliant bibliographic metadata for open access books.

Open Book Collective Platform (COPIM WP2) - Platform to support collective library funding for open access book publishers, infrastrucures and initiatives. Using Thoth to display information about the nature of publications across all participating publishers, infrastructures and initiatives - such as author institutions, subject areas.

Open Dissemination Service (COPIM WP5) - Dedicated Service supporting open access book publishers in the areas of dissemination and preservation. Using Thoth to disseminate metadata and files, in various formats (ONIX, CSV, MARC) to a large number of actors part of the open access book supply chain (see also the Thoth Wiki) - such as OAPEN, Project MUSE, JSTOR, Portico.

White label publisher website - Complete commercial website for use by scholarly publishers to display and retail their content. Developed and adopted by Open Book Publishers. Using Thoth by calling on its database to display rich book level metadata for a publishers’ content.

While the design of Thoth is focused on the immediate needs of publishers, the project is also keeping its eyes on the broader horizon of open & (FAIR) data. How might Thoth continue to serve stakeholders through the identified use-cases? And what other use-cases may be there?

Researchers from all fields, their employers (universities and research institutes), policy makers and funders

Training and skills for open science
Skills within the wider research context

Early Career Researchers Open science skills Transferable skills

As the employment landscape for Early-Career Researchers (ECRs) is becoming increasingly intersectoral, international, and interdisciplinary, it is important that doctoral programs include training in soft and hard skills that are not only fundamental for research, but are also transferable to other careers. These transferable skills can increase ECRs’ employability, allowing them to pursue different career paths and broaden their options in the academic, governmental, and private sectors. Among others, transferable skills related to Open Science are becoming increasingly important, and they can be acquired with doctoral training. However, as the EOSC Executive Board Skills and Training Group pointed out, several issues still exist. These include a lack of Open Science expertise (particularly in relation to Open Data), varying levels of digital literacy, inadequate media and communication skills, and a lack of centralization of learning and training resources. On the other hand, measuring researchers’ skills and competences is a key first step for the European Commission towards addressing the precarity of ERCs and reducing brain drain. We have reviewed the curricula of two course providers in Open Science, FOSTER and the Open Science MOOC, and have identified a list of transferable skills, classifying them on the basis of learning outcome. Through this classification, we have found that a diverse array of transferable skills are crucial to Open Science education. We foresee a key role of Open Science training and its derived skills in empowering researchers for their career development and assessment.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and communities, repository managers, data stewards, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, service providers and innovators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities
Value added data products/services from open science

research data repositories, registry, use case analysis, re3data COREF

re3data is the global registry for research data repositories. As of January 2021, the service lists over 2700 digital repositories across all scientific disciplines and provides an extensive description of repositories based on a detailed metadata schema. A variety of funders, publishers, and scientific organizations around the world refer to re3data within their guidelines and policies, recommending the service to researchers looking for appropriate repositories for storage and discovery of research data.

The presentation focuses on the development of the Conceptual Model for User Stories for the re3data service. Since its launch in 2012, re3data has been designed to support open science activities. The registry serves the needs of heterogeneous user groups, first of all aimed at researchers searching for suitable repositories to find and deposit research data. In addition, re3data contributes to other open science infrastructures as a valuable source of metadata about research data repositories.

To better understand the needs of its users the re3data COREF project conducted a stakeholder survey. Participants were also invited to join an associated online workshop to further discuss their requirements and recommendations. The presentation will focus on the most important findings from these activities and introduce common use cases of re3data. It will address how re3data currently interlinks with several other services and how the integration of third-party information can be realized.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and research communities, repository managers, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, service providers and innovators

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities
Value added data products/services from open science
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and FAIR data
Citizen science: barriers and opportunities for collaboration

Repositories, CRIS, Semantic Web, Data Mining

REDI+ is the Ecuadorian project of CEDIA for setting up and operate the national information of Science, Technology, and Innovation. It is an open standards-based platform, specifically as a central aggregator of open access repositories of Ecuador. The main goal of this project is to develop an open, interoperable and integrated national platform that provides information of publications, researchers, patents, events, services, and general results of science and technology, and innovation. Besides, the platform allows providing value-added services for access to enriched data and aggregated information to improve decisionmaking at different levels, local, institutional, and in the private sector. The vision is to have an information ecosystem of research, technology, and innovation in Ecuador to provide value, accessibility, and development for all people.

Open Science enablers, infrastructures and policies

Sharing best practices and knowledge, Sustaining open science training: people, resources, governance

TRIPLE, Training strategies, Engagement

In the last years, Open Science made a significant headway in European research policy and advocacy. Alongside the benefits of working towards enabling “open by default” in all disciplines, this momentum led to a complex, increasingly crowded and multidimensional landscape of Open Science enablers, infrastructures and policies. Questions of what exactly are we talking about when talking about the EOSC, how to navigate the latest generation of discovery services or whether to find no author-facing-fee OA funding schemes became recurrent points of discussions even among those who are actively involved in implementing certain aspects of the European OS roadmap.

TRIPLE is a H2020 project with a primary aim of developing a discovery platform for SSH. Within TRIPLE, we found it important to dedicate a specific task force to pave the way towards exchange and a shared understanding of the latest European Open Science advancements, filtered by the TRIPLE project perspective. Despite the original intention to address our events only to Consortium members, we decided to open them to the community and to focus on topics which have relevance for specific TRIPLE’s activities and tasks (i.e. the EOSC onboarding), and on services and solutions which are of interest to the whole community (i.e. Open Research Europe , and the EOSC state-of-the-art and objectives).

The presentation will specifically focus on:

• the synergies that have been implemented with the main RIs in the SSH field (OPERAS, CLARIN, CESSDA, DARIAH) and with training coordinators communities (EOSC Skills and Training Working Group, OpenAIRE CoP of Training coordinators, SSHOC Training community, ICDI Competence Center)
• the strategies adopted to a) provide support to TRIPLE members on Open Science and the EOSC via adequate training; b) engage new potential interested audiences in TRIPLE’s events; c) produce FAIR training materials, to ensure their reusability by the general public.

Agenda