Read the National Pilot Interview from Austria and explore all the progress of OSTrails pilot studies. Check the latest on their national activities and learn how they’re progressing with the integration of open science and research assessment. This month we had the pleasure of speaking with Daniel Spichtingerand Victoria Eisenheldfrom the Univerisity of Vienna (UNI WIEN), Tomasz Miksafrom the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien)and Ilire Hasani-Mavriqifrom the Graz University of Technology (TU Graz). Enjoy!

 "OSTrails provides the Austrian community with the means to further enhance the quality and interoperability of RDM services. Specifically, it helps us to digitally transform data management planning at TU Graz, TU Wien, Uni Wien, and AUSSDA by maximizing the uptake of maDMPs and the FAIR principles in Austria and thus benefiting researchers by lowering the effort involved in data management."

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

Three universities — TU Graz, TU Wien, and Uni Wien — collaborate to implement the Austrian national pilot. Each of these universities has significantly contributed to the EOSC:  

Uni Wien, member of the EOSC Association since 2020, is actively involved in several EOSC-related projects and task forces, both nationally and internationally, including major EU projects like EOSC BEYOND and EOSC Future. TU Wien has been engaged in EOSC from the early stages through its involvement in the EOSC Secretariat, participating in various EOSC projects and contributing to national initiatives. TU Graz is a member of the EOSC Focus project consortium that works towards aligning the technical development of EOSC. All three organisations are members of the EOSC Support Office Austria (the operational branch of the Austrian Mandated Organization of the EOSC Association). 

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

In OSTrails, we are looking forward tocontributing to the Plan-Track-Assess framework components by considering several use cases in the pilot, with each organisation focusing on complementary aspects. Our common goal is to enhance DMP support, which we aim to achieve through extending, aligning and integrating DMP tools, enhancing DMP support to researchers, supporting data stewards in creating discipline-specific DMPs, providing further support implementing RDM policies, promoting FAIR principles and assessing their implementation in digital objects, as well as contributing to relevant national and international initiatives. TU Wien is specifically looking forward to adoption of the Interoperability Frameworks developed by OSTrails to better integrate their RDM services, e.g. DMP Tool based onDAMAP with repositories, SKGs, and environments where researchers work with data.

-How is planning, tracking and assessing research realised in your country/scientific domain? 

In Austria, the current situation is as follows:

Planning is primarily addressed through the development and support of Data Management Plans (DMPs), including tools such as DAMAP. TU Graz, TU Wien and Medical University Graz run DAMAP as an institutional tool. They integrate it with their internal systems to maximise the reuse of information and to help in planning. Additionally, other Austrian universities participating in the national project SharedRDM are considering using DAMAP, with roll-out of the tool ongoing in some cases, and others still in the planning phase. Furthermore, many universities, including Uni Wien help researchers to meet funder requirements by manually reviewing DMPs, clarifying questions and offering trainings for researchers who write DMPs.

Tracking: Most of the universities in Austria use a CRIS system to track publications. However, these systems do not track other types of digital research objects systematically. Users can manually update relevant entries, sometimes by integration with ORCID. There is no national SKG or a comparable tracking mechanism for all types of digital research objects.

Assessing: As mentioned, staff of participating universities manually reviews DMPS on request before submission to funders. Funders usually perform simple checks of DMPs. To our knowledge, the production of digital research objects – other than publications – is not systematically reflected in the assessment of researchers’ performance at the moment. Hopefully, this will change with the adoption ofCoARA.  

-Can you provide some details on your pilot's main actors, services and priorities? How will your pilot adopt the results of OSTrails? 

All universities in the Austrian pilot, Uni Wien, TU Wien and TU Graz, have approved institutional RDM policies to guide the implementation of the FAIR principles.¹ They provide extensive RDM-services, including support for creating and implementing DMPs, and offer workshops and training to help researchers understand and apply FAIR principles in their work. They are also involved in EOSC initiatives and projects to align with national and international standards and policies. 

Uni Wien hosts the institutional repositoryPHAIDRA and is the coordinator of AUSSDA, the Austrian Social Science Data Archive consortium, which serves as the Service Provider ofCESSDA ERIC for all of Austria, offering services for the social sciences. PHAIDRA facilitates the long-term storage of research output from all scientific disciplines and multiple institutions use its open-source software across Europe. AUSSDA is certified with the Core Trust Seal that recognises it as a “trustworthy repository”. The two repositories allow and encourage the use of open licenses and provide permanent addresses for research data, along with comprehensive metadata. Uni Wien has also implemented training programs for data stewards to help bridge the gap between researchers and data management requirements.² Furthermore, Uni Wien is involved in several large international open e-infrastructures, sometimes as a coordinator and in a leading role. The Open Data movement is a significant component of this involvement. One of Uni Wien’s primary priorities in OSTrails is to develop standardised DMP evaluation practices in line with national funder requirements and thereby improve the quality of their feedback processes to researchers.

TU Wien supports researchers to publish their research output according to FAIR principles by addressing relevant issues early on with the machine-actionable DMP toolDAMAP. They also provide a data repository that offers persistent identifiers, standardized and machine-readable usage licenses, and open, free, and standardized communication protocols. FAIRness is further assured by allowing metadata to be exported in various machine-readable formats and by adding interfaces for other external services. Additionally, TU Wien integrates FAIR principles into regular workshops and a course for master students. TU Wien also serves as the primary contact for theGO FAIR Austria office, reinforcing their commitment to FAIR data principles.  

TU Wien will deploy the extended version of DAMAP that follows OSTrails Interoperability Framework for DMPs. This will allow them to have a standardised way to access information on ongoing experiments through a standardised API. Furthermore, the university plans to integrate DAMAP with software running in laboratories, where researchers conduct their experiments, to ensure better integration and to enable DMPs to become true live documents: changing contributors in a DMP created with DAMAP will result in a change of privileges in other systems, like the experimentation environment, or data repository. 

TU Grazhas ratified two discipline-specific RDM policies to implement the FAIR principles. The university has been a seminal contributor to efforts such asFAIR Data Austria, developing tools and repositories for FAIR data management, and has also instituted a marketplace for FAIR/RDM-related projects. 

The primary priority of the universities in the Austrian pilot is the enhancement of DMP support. This includes enhancing DMP support to researchers and supporting data stewards in creating discipline-specific DMPs. TU Graz, in collaboration with TU Wien, also focus on technological integration by improving and aligning machine-actionable DMP tools. Additionally, both universities aim to connect current repositories and machine-actionable DMP tools to the OpenAIRE Graph and other SKGs. Other goals of the Austrian pilot include to further support implementing RDM policies, promoting FAIR principles and assessing their implementation in digital objects, as well as contributing to national and international initiatives. 

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

Given that the national pilot is supposed to start in month 18 of the project,we are still in theearly stages ofestablishing the next steps in our retrospective organisations. As a next activity, we will organise anotheronline meeting of the Austrian National Pilot. On a more technical level,AUSSDA will upgrade its repository software to increase its score in the F-UJI FAIR metric. TU Wien’s next steps willbe: a) toidentify groups of researchers for whom integration ofDAMAP via the DMP IF could be beneficial, b) to flesh out specific use cases and collect specific requirements, and c) to analyse the pathways described in Deliverable D1.1. and to discuss which of them are relevant to what extent for the university.

Thank you for the interesting discussion! 

¹ Uni Wien:RDM policy: https://rdm.univie.ac.at/fileadmin/user_upload/p_forschungsdatenmanagement/Dokumente/RDM_Policy_UNIVIE_v1_en.pdf 

TU Wien: RDM policy: https://www.tuwien.at/index.php?eID=dms&s=4&path=Directives%20and%20Regulations%20of%20the%20Rectorate/Policy%20for%20Research%20Data%20Management.pdf

TU Graz:RDM policy: https://www.tugraz.at/sites/rdm/policies/tu-graz-framework-policy-for-rdm

² See the websiteData Stewards at the University of Vienna for further information : https://rdm.univie.ac.at/data-stewards-at-the-university/

National
Pilots

Overview

In brief

• Croatia

  The Ruđer Bošković Institute, the largest Croatian scientific research center of a multidisciplinary character. Within a Croatian national pilot activities, a data management plan template (maDMP) for the Croatian Science Foundation (HRZZ) will be developed, and the archiving of these maDMPs in local repositories will be facilitated. Additionally, metadata pertaining to maDMPs and research datasets will be integrated into the national CRIS system and interconnected with other relevant entities. This will be accomplished through the utilization of the national repository infrastructure (Dabar), the national scientific information system (CroRIS), and the Argos open-source software.

• Greece

  HEAL-Link, Hellenic Academic Libraries Link,will develop maDMP and dataset templates for the Universities of the HEAL-Link consortium, interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph, and assess FAIRness of HEAL-Link repositories’ digital objects. For this purpose, the Hellenic Academic Research Data Management Initiative (HARDMIN), HEAL-Link scholarly infrastructure services and HEAL-Link ARGOS-GR DMP tool will be employed.

• the Netherlands

  SURF, the cooperative association of Dutch educational and research institutions, will develop maDMP templates suitable for Dutch Research Council (NWO) and Universities, evaluate criteria for DMPs taking discipline specific requirements into account, and test them against the NWO rubric, embed FAIR Implementation Profiles (FIPs) into NWO and Leiden University (LU) maDMP templates, PID-ify NWO and LU maDMP templates, interoperate maDMP templates with PID Graph, extend PID Graph with maDMPs, and interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph. For this purpose,PID Graph, CWTS, research information and RDM community, EPIC Handle resolver and RAiD repository  will beemployed.

• Norway

  Sikt, the Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research, will develop maDMP templates for the Norwegian research community, configure and link templates with the new joint CRIS system and publications repository, extend the new joint CRIS system and publications repository with entities and Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) and interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph, Assess FAIRness of data archive digital objects, codefine DMP evaluation criteria with the Research Council of Norway, enhance the OA-Barometer with links to publications, DMPs, data and software. For this purpose, Sikt national joint CRIS and publication repository, national data archives, Sikt DMP tool and the Norwegian OA-Barometerwill beemployed.

• Serbia

  University of Belgrade will develop maDMP templates for national funder and University of Belgrade, including FAIR metrics within the template to assess DMPs content, codefine FAIR metrics for Life Sciences, Social Sciences and Applied Sciences, assess FAIRness of repositories’ digital objects and create qualified references with DMPs. For this purpose, national repositories (DAIS, CER, VinaR, etc) and Argos DMP tool will be employed.

• Austria

  In the Austrian pilot, three Austrian universities will collaborate to align and improve the support provided at Austrian research performing organisations about DMPs:
  • the Graz University of Technology Graz (TU Graz), (https://www.tugraz.at/en/home/),
  • the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), (https://www.tuwien.at/en/),
  • and the University of Vienna (UNIVIE), (https://www.univie.ac.at/en/), specifically the University Library (https://bibliothek.univie.ac.at/en/) and the departments AUSSDA (The Austrian Social Science Data Archive, https://aussda.at/en/) and PHAIDRA (the University of Vienna's institutional repository, https://datamanagement.univie.ac.at/en/page/33/?l=566).
  In OSTrails, the Austrian pilot will extend, align and integrate DMP tools developed at TU Wien and TU Graz, explore and develop means to implement customizable DMP templates with dynamic building blocks, create an overview of the most popular DMP templates, and support data stewards to create discipline-specific DMP templates and processes. "

• Poland

  Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC) and Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling (ICM) of Poland will develop ma-templates for National Science Center (NCN) DMPs, including metrics within the template to assess DMPs against FAIRness of their described outputs, extend ROHub tool with PIDs for different digital objects and other research entities, (ma-)DMPs and FAIR metrics and interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph, enable interoperability of repositories with the OpenAIRE Graph, codefine DMP evaluation criteria with NCN, assess FAIRness of repositories and ROHub digital objects. For this purpose, ARGOS-PL, ROHub, PIONIER.ID, National Data Storage, RepOD, RDS, MX-RDR will be employed.

• Ireland

  Ireland's first technological university, incorporated in 2018 and encompassing three previous institutes of technology. A multidisciplinary institution with five faculties. In the context of OSTrails, TU Dublin will act as the national lead for the now five technological universities in Ireland, who will take part in the project as a consortium.

• Portugal

  The University of Minho was funded in 1973 and its mission is to generate, disseminate and apply knowledge, based on freedom of thought and the plurality of critical exercises, promoting higher education and contributing to the construction of a model of society based on humanist principles, with knowledge, creativity and innovation as factors of growth, sustainable development, well-being and solidarity. know more - https://www.uminho.pt/EN/Pages/default.aspx
  The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) is the national public agency that supports research, technology and innovation in all areas of knowledge. Under the supervision of the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, the FCT began its activities 1997. FCT's mission is to continuously promote the advancement of scientific and technological knowledge in Portugal, to achieve the highest international standards of quality and competitiveness in all scientific and technological fields, and to stimulate its dissemination and contribution to society and the productive fabric. know more - https://www.fct.pt/

• France

  Inria, the French national research institute for digital science and technology, will act as the national lead for the computer science community and develop 2 maDMP templates. Having pioneered OS software infrastructure (co-founding Software Heritage), we pay particular attention to software and its place in DMPs in relation to data. Inria works closely with the French Recherche Data Gouv ecosystem to improve DMP software integration by linking relevant articles citing software and data and aims at archiving these maDMPS in the French national repository HAL.

• Finland

  CSC provides solutions to Finnish research community, coordinating the DMP Consortium, FAIR data services, national CRIS system, and Academy of Finland’s funding proposal management tool. In the Finnish pilot focus will be on data interoperability rather than building specific solutions, and the national DMP Consortium and the Finnish National Open Science Coordination will be heavily involved, ensuring a greater effect on the Finnish research community. Finnish CRIS system (Research.fi), the Academy of Finland’s online services (SARA) and several DMP tools (e.g. DMPTuuli, and other relevant) will be employed and technical API interphases tested.

• Germany

  RWTH Aachen University will Develop ma-templates for the NFDI4Chem and NFDI4Ing DMPs, including metrics within the templates to assess DMPs against FAIRness of their described outputs, configure and link NFDI4Chem template with Chemotion Electronic Lab Notebook, create qualified references of DMPs and Lab Notebooks, interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph. For this purpose, RDMO; Chemotion Electronic Lab Notebook and repository will be employed.

• Spain

  RECOLECTA, or Collector of Open Science, is the national aggregator of open access repositories. All Spanish digital infrastructures in which research results are published and / or deposited in open access are grouped together on this platform.
  The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, F.S.P. (FECYT) is a public foundation attached to the Ministry of Science and Innovation. Thanks to this collaboration, the FECYT works to strengthen the link between science and society through actions that promote open and inclusive science, culture and scientific education, responding to the needs and challenges of the Spanish system of science, technology and innovation.
  More Info: https://recolecta.fecyt.es/

• Czech Republic

  Czech technical university in Prague (CTU) will develop maDMP templates for NTK, including metrics within the template to assess DMPs against FAIRness of their described artefacts, assess FAIRness of CTU digital objects, deploy the DMP evaluator Tool, codefine DMP evaluation criteria with national funders (Czech Science Foundation and Technology Agency of the Czech Republic). For this purpose, DSW Czech instance, PID infrastructure and CTU Dspace will be employed.  

• Sweden

  University of Gothenburg (UGOT) and the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE) will  develop ma-template for DMPs based on the SND Checklist for DMPs, embedding FAIR metrics within the template to assess DMPs against FAIRness of their described artefacts, align with DORIS and explore links with local and national CRIS systems (SweCRIS), interoperate with the OpenAIRE Graph, assess FAIRness of SND DORIS digital objects, deploy DMP Evaluator Tool at SND. For this purpose, SND and DORIS (data organisation and publication system), SweCRIS systems and local CRIS from Universities will be employed.

Partners

• 

  Rudjer Boskovic Institute

• 

  Hellenic Academic Libraries Link

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  "Athena" Research Center

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  SURF

• 

  Centre for Science and Technology Studies

• 

  Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education & Research

• 

  University of Belgrade

• 

  TU Wien

• 

  University of Vienna

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  TU Graz

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  Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center

• 

  University of Warsaw

• 

  Technical University of Dublin

• 

  University of Minho

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  Foundation for Science and Technology

• 

  Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique

• 

  Finnish IT centre for science

• 

  RWTH Aachen University

• 

  FECYT

• 

  Czech technical university in Prague

• 

  University of Göteborg

The occasion

On May 7th 2024, OSTrails was in Madrid for the 1st Symposium of Research Infrastructures (RIs) organised by the RICH Europe project. The event complemented the project’s activities to strengthen and standardise the services of Research Infrastructures National Contact Points (NCPs) across Europe. It highlighted Horizon Europe's support for Open Science and broader access to RIs, showcasing funded projects, educating NCPs, and fostering global dialogue on RIs.

Supporting EOSC and Open Science Policies

During the Symposium, a session was held to reflect on the project's lessons learned and gather feedback that would enhance the Open Science policy landscape in Europe. Pilar Castro, Head of the Open Access, Repositories and Journals Unit at FECYT, a beneficiary of OSTrails, moderated the session and Elli Papadopoulou, deputy coordinator of OSTrails, provided an overview of the project activities contributing to enhancing the EOSC infrastructure and policies for open science. 

OSTrails has set the ambitious goal of delivering a FAIR-enhanced, interconnected and machine actionable environmentalong with the pathways to navigate scientific informationshared across services that enable and support planning, tracking and assessing research activities. To achieve this, the consortium consists of major service providers of data management plans (DMPs), FAIR assessments and scientific knowledge graphs (SKGs)who collaborate to ensure interoperability and develop common methods, standards and tools for integrating and harmonising best practices. 

Complementary to the technical work, 25 pilots serve as the backbone of the project ensuring that the results are fit-for-purpose and pragmatic, respecting the diverse research ecosystems of the 15 national infrastructures and the 9 Science Clusters RIs that they represent. In this endeavour, the user communities, research funders and local stakeholders are engaged to co-define and validate the outcomes of the project in different countries and domains reflecting on and supporting their open science policies. Finally, a pilot on the Horizon Europe framework programme aims to scale up the adoption of OSTrails results leveraging the OpenAIRE Graph data.  

Key takeaways

All presentations of the dedicated policy session emphasised the importance of community involvement in driving progress -> “by community, for community”. Furthermore, the discussion highlighted the opportunities arising by infrastructures in strengthening data sharingand eliminating market failures similar to the scientific publishers phenomenon, and they challenged the implementation of Open Science which is different at macro and micro levels (European vs national vs institutional). Overall, it underscored the use of curated data, transparent indicators, and knowledge graphs, such as the OpenAIREGraph, to inform policymaking effectively, and exuded hope towards initiatives such as CoARA that have the ability to accelerate Open Science adoption targeting the much needed shift of the research culture today.

Resources

• The presentation is available at the OSTrails Zenodo community. 
• The recordings of the symposium can be found on YouTube: RICH Europe 1st Symposia. "The role of the RIs in the Open Science and the ERA implementation" (youtube.com)