- Bojan Macan

-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How does it contribute to EOSC?

The Ruđer Bošković Institute (RBI) isCroatia's largest multidisciplinary scientific research center and OpenAIRE’s National Open Access Desk (NOAD) in the country, with a significant contribution to EOSC. RBI, spearheaded by its Centre for Scientific Information, has been instrumental in promoting open access (OA) and open science (OS) principles through training and engagement at both institutional and national levels. The institution maintains digital repositories (FULIR and FULIR Data) and a cloud storage service for managing research data. Collaboratively with external partners, RBI has also played a significant role in developing national OA and OS infrastructures, such as CroRIS and DABAR.  

As an active member of significant initiatives, such as the Croatian Open Science Cloud Initiative (HR-OOZ), OpenAIRE AMKE (co-founder), and EOSC Association (Observer since 2022), and contributor in numerous EU projects related to OA and OS (OpenAIRE, FOSTER, EOSC-hub, NI4OS-Europe, PATTERN and OSTrails), RBI has been a key advocate and supporter of OS, committed to advancing the field.

-What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to?

We’re particularly excited about the prospect of integrating Data Management Plans (DMPs) with various other entities within our research information systems, as well as depositing them in local repositories. This integration will not only streamline the data management process but also enhance the overall transparency, accessibility and usability of research outputs. The capability to store DMPs in dedicated repositories will ensure their long-term preservation and accessibility for future reference.

The implementation of ARGOS holds great promise for our data management practices, providing advanced tools to manage and track research data throughout its lifecycle. The added features ARGOS provides could significantly enhance our capabilities in managing and utilizing research data effectively. Overall, we are eagerly anticipating the transformative impact that these developments will have on our data management workflows and research outcomes.

-OSTrails is all about planning, tracking and assessing research. How are these being realised in your country?

In Croatia, planning, tracking, and assessing research is being realized through several key aspects. The Quality standards for the evaluation and reaccreditation of universities and scientific institutes, developed by the Accreditation Council of the Agency for Science and Higher Education (ASHE), assess HEIs and RPOs on several criteria, including the existence of an institutional strategy for research, development, and innovation. These standards emphasize the importance of research planning, quality assessment and alignment with professional standards, such as ethics, transparency, and academic integrity. Institutions are expected to have a publicly accessible research strategy plan and store research data in accordance with FAIR principle whenever feasible. The Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ),as major research funder,holds a significant role in the field, having introduced specific requirements for Grant Awards, fostering OA publications, DMPs implementation, and enrichment of the national research information system (CroRIS). CroRIS is owned by the Croatian Ministry of Science and Education (MSE) and serves as the official system for registering all research activities, equipment and results. The Croatian Open Science Plan, proposed by the HR-OOZ Initiative, seeks to standardise OS practices and researcher education, further solidifying the country’s commitment to fostering innovation and excellence in research while ensuring equitable access to scientific knowledge and resources.

These policies and initiatives reflect Croatia’s progress towards Open Responsible Research and Innovation practices, which is to be enhanced through the adoption of new national and institutional OS policies and the integration of OS activities into research assessment procedures. Future developments focus on the integration of DMPs and research data, the implementation of Open Science in Croatia and the use of CroRIS as a monitoring tool for various reporting purposes.

-Can you provide some details on the main actors, services and priorities of your pilot? How will the results of OSTrails be adopted by your pilot?

The results of OSTrails will be integrated into our pilot through several strategic steps. Firstly, we will enhance the efficacy of DMPs by developing a tailored maDMP template in ARGOS DMP platform, based on HRZZ requirements, facilitating their archival in local repositories using the national repository infrastructure Dabar. Furthermore, we aim to establish an open, interoperable ecosystem of Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) by implementing new objects within the national current research information system CroRIS, such as DMPs and datasets, and enabling connections between these new objects and other information. This will enrich and demonstrate our community’s FAIR implementation, enhancing the traceability of research outputs. By implementing these measures, we aim to promote FAIR principles in Croatia, ensuring compliance with funder requirements and enhancing the quality of research data management for all funded and published research outputs. RBI will remain the head actor in piloting activities, leveraging established communication channels with the national librarians' network and users and administrators of the national e-infrastructure.

-How does the next day of OSTrails project look like in your country? 

The Croatian academic and research community will benefit from this pilot project by adopting improved tools for creating maDMPs, enhanced infrastructure for archiving them, and better linkage of DMPs with other related objects in the national infrastructure. This approach will enhance transparency and accessibility of information regarding research data generated during research projects. A fully developed open ecosystem of SKG through the CroRIS will provide the Croatian academic and research community with a more interconnected and transparent infrastructure, offering them comprehensive tools and services to facilitate the sharing of research information.

 - Johanna Laiho Kauranne

"Our stakeholders have warmly welcomed the EU OSTrails national pilot in Finland. It has brought together many research data management experts from the Finnish academia. Through online webinars, we are addressing crucial questions on leveraging machine-actionability to support researchers and research groups. I am confident that, with increased cooperation with DMP tool providers and following the Salzburg Manifesto, we will achieve significant advancements in research data management with machine-actionable DMPs." 

-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How does it contribute to EOSC?

CSC is a prominent leader in research data management and computing ecosystems, with a multifaced and impactful contribution to the EOSC framework. Leveraging its expertise, international cooperation, and infrastructure, CSC promotes the use of large datasets, AI methods, and high-performance computing, while supporting national objectives and the European Green Deal with low-carbon solutions. 

In addition, it actively contributes to EOSC goals, by participating in numerous projects (e.g. FAIRCORE4EOSC, FAIR-Impact, Skills4EOSC, COARA, and OScARS), supporting EOSC in providing FAIR data services, and mainly by incorporating EOSC aims into its strategic targets. The key outcome of this engagement includes the EOSC Secretariat studies on Innovative business models, rules of participation, and framework for sustainable governance as well as EOSC-Hub integration and management system comprised of a catalogue of services, software and data from the EGI Federation, EUDAT CDI, INDIGO-DataCloud and major research e-infrastructures.

CSC helps its customers open and disseminate their data and data resources for use by research and education, individuals and society as required by the nature of the data. Our services are used to make open data available, protect sensitive and licensed data, manage continuous data flows, and store unique data so that it is properly accessible. We provide support for securing the quality of data throughout its entire lifecycle.

-What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to?

OSTrails brings together 38 partners and affiliates from 17 EU countries to work on developing tools for FAIRness in EOSC. We are excited about the opportunity to co-create machine-actionable Data management plans (maDMPs) together with the tool providers benchmarking the national, science specific and EU Horizon needs. This intensive co-development is needed and will facilitate better controlling and empowering support for research.

We are looking forward to benchmarking with the national pilots (15 in total) and linking also with the 9 thematic pilots across scientific fields on the use cases and implementation of machine actionable DMPs. We consider it is also important to note that there is a Horizon Europe pilot on the project. The co-development of the pilots and the development of infrastructure and technical tools will be exciting, and the start of the project is already very promising, as we are confident, we will reach our goals within the 3 years. We are also thrilled that there will be a greater increase in awareness of the SKG graphs and further development of FAIR metrics.

-OSTrails is all about planning, tracking and assessing research. How are these being realised in your country?

Planning and tracking are conducted in various ways depending on the research performing institutions, requirements by the funding instruments and scientific areas. Research organizations have their own support services, and CSC facilitates generic support e.g. for data stewards. Also, linkages to large research programmes have their specific tracking and assessment procedures.

There is genuine interest in enhancing the machine actionability and interoperability of systems to decrease the amount of manual reporting in tracking and assessing research thus lightening the administrative load.

The Finnish Research Information Hub has been created to provide high quality data for the needs of science policy and help funders and research organizations to gain access and report research outputs and activities.Research.fi, offered by the Ministry of Education and Culture, collects and shares information on research conducted in Finland. The service improves the findability and reuse of research information and experts on research and increases the visibility and societal impact of Finnish research. Submitting information is mainly voluntary. Only the submission of publication information is mandatory for higher education institutions. Ongoing efforts by Research.fi are underway, seeking to enhance the quality and interoperability of metadata and to include new data sources. Currently, a planned project aims to better integrate all funding, activities, and results related to research projects in Finland.

-Can you provide some details on the main actors, services and priorities of your pilot? How will the results of OSTrails be adopted by your pilot?

The ambition of the National Pilot in Finland is to develop a national machine-actionable data management plan (maDMP) template for national funders and local infrastructure (PIDs, CRIS, repositories) taking into account EU DMP templates (e.g. ERC, Horizon and Science Europe) as well as RDA standard. Our target is that 60 national organizations will find the usage of the maDMP template to bring efficiencies in research data management. 

To succeed in this, we engage openly all Finnish Academic research organisations in our National Pilot in Finland. We collect use cases to digitalize the research data management process to better serve researchers, research institutes and research funders. We also assess the RDA maDMP Standard and examine if there are essential areas that should be included and better highlighted, and more importantly what data could be structural to support efficient flow of information.

We have already presented the OSTrails project and pilot in theFAIR-Impact National Roadshow event in Finland on the 17th of May, and it is time to review it and head towards planning future actions.

Now, we are planning the nextnational pilotwebinar in Finland that will take place on the 6th of June, in which we will have presentations from our national partners on the development needs for maDMPs and interactive sessions for clarifying information content of maDMPs.

In brief: This May, the research infrastructure community met in Vienna for the EuroCRIS conference to examine emerging trends to enhance the availability and accessibility of current research information systems (CRIS). Natalia Manola, OpenAIRE’s CEO and coordinator of OSTrails, presented the transformations needed in today’s landscape showing the ways that the project supports them through standards and collaborations. Given that OSTrails technical manager, Tomasz Miksa, is located in Vienna, that created the perfect opportunity for a hybrid meeting to progress the work on the pathways, interoperability and commons for Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), FAIR Assessment tools, and DMP platforms.

EuroCRIS

An annual celebration of CRIS systems in Europe: The 16th edition of euroCRIS biennial series of conferences brought together a diverse audience, including managers of research institutions and funding bodies, evaluators, librarians, ICT experts, and policymakers. The conference spanned 3 days and was full of keynotes, workshops and roundtables as well as lightning poster sessions that highlighted current developments, emerging trends and case studies that portrait the current landscape and its possibilities for the future.

Zooming in on open science, open infrastructure, and research information management:The second day of CRIS2024 opened with a keynote presentation by Natalia Malona who was invited to talk about the role of OpenAIRE and the opportunities and challenges emerging in the current transformation of the research landscape. Communicating the importance for collaborations and open infrastructures, she stressed the need for interconnectivity across research services and the potential laid down by generative AI already transforming the research process that can be exploited by them, sharing the example of the OpenAIRE Graph and service ecosystem.

A collaborative journey to setting standards and commons in EOSC:OSTrails was highlighted for the collectiveness and harmonization it brings on the three research phases of planning-tracking-assessing scientific information, leading to seamless exchange and automation across SKGs, FAIR Assessment tools, and DMP platforms. This is a necessary transformation not only for research assessment but also for research processes that enable simpler and smarter workflows to be realized and used by the research community.

Technical Meeting 

The two-day meeting took place at SBA Research with eighteen members of OSTrails joining in person and twenty-five participating online to represent the technical objectives of the project. The meeting was hosted by Tomasz Miksa, with assistance from Suvini Lai and Lukas Arnhold.

Draft Pathways presentation

On the first day, participants' expectations for the meeting's topics were collected and reviewed. Discussions centered on modeling OSTrails' technical outputs, including pathways, the interoperability framework, and the architecture that connects SKGs, DMPs, and FAIR assessment results. The productive exchange of views on the methodological aspects of pathways and the intended interactions between these services and platforms clarified ambiguous issues and highlighted commonalities between different perspectives, laying the foundation for the project's next technical developments.

Towards enhanced interoperability

The second day was dedicated to modeling and exploring interactions within the SKGs and DMPs platforms. A common model for exchanging and harvesting information based on a new API was outlined as a convergence point for modeling interoperability across SKGs platforms. Similarly, efficient protocols for interactions across DMP platforms and the key pathways for DMP-SKG interactions were identified.

Next steps

The meeting concluded with discussions on upcoming milestones and plans for another face-to-face meeting in the fall to further advance OSTrails' contributions to Open Science.