Read the Inteview with the Social Sciences Thamatic Pilot to discover the latest updates on OSTrails pilot studies. Explore their progress in integrating open science principles and advancing research assessment. This month we had the pleasure of speaking with Alen Vodopijevec,Head of IT at CESSDA ERIC.
 |
| - Alen Vodopijevec |
"CESSDA is leveraging OSTrails to enhance interoperability and FAIRness of social science data within EOSC, aiming to create a more reliable, transparent, and impactful research environment."
-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How do they contribute to EOSC?
CESSDA (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives) -https://www.cessda.eu/ - is a distributed research infrastructure dedicated to supporting social science research by providing access to high-quality data across Europe. CESSDA brings together national data service providers from various countries to facilitate data sharing, accessibility, and reuse.
CESSDA aims to enhance scientific excellence in the social sciences, promote Open Science, and integrate into the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). By providing trusted repositories, tools, and training, CESSDA seeks to support researchers, ensure secure data access, and drive innovation in data discovery. Its vision includes expanding data interoperability, supporting interdisciplinary research, and contributing to solving societal challenges.
Building on the outcomes of previous EOSC-related projects, we are now actively involved in the development of the EOSC Federation. Our contributions include piloting the CESSDA EOSC Node (as part of EOSC Beyond project - https://www.eosc-beyond.eu/), participating in EOSC-A Task Forces, and actively contributing to the EOSC Federation Handbook.
-What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to?
We are very enthusiastic about OSTrails and its potential. It can make Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) and their connections more real and useful for all stakeholders (researchers, funders, policy makers, data curators etc). For CESSDA, this presents numerous valuable opportunities to address key important challenges in our field.
The capacity within an SKG to connect diverse research entities such as Data Management Plans (DMPs), datasets, and other outputs, is incredibly valuable. This feature will significantly improve our ability to check metadata quality and facilitate automatic assessment of FAIRness at a large scale. This is essential to ensure that research data in EOSC is of high quality and readily reusable.
OSTrails offers valuable possibilities for metadata enrichment and advanced analysis. The ability to easily add enriched metadata back to data sources promises a more efficient and transparent research system. Imagine the power of effortlessly uncovering connections between research projects, datasets, and publications that were previously hidden!
Ultimately, our vision is to see FAIR assessment results from OSTrails integrated into the EOSC Federation. We are particularly interested to see how FAIRness scores and good metadata quality can be recognised by an EOSC crediting system, as some initiatives are planning. This holds significant potential to encourage and reward open science practices throughout all research steps. This is strongly aligned with open science principles and could form a basis for prioritising services and funding within EOSC in the future.
-How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your scientific domain?
Currently, in social science across Europe, planning, tracking, and assessment of research are not very consistent. DMPs are becoming more common, which is good. However, they are often not standardised, easy to compare, or really machine-actionable. Also, tracking research outputs and connecting them is not always done well.
This is further difficult by different data sharing cultures and lack of common open science standards. As a result, assessing FAIRness and impact of research outputs becomes complex and sometimes subjective. This situation makes it difficult to have good interoperability and to fully implement open science principles in our domain.
OSTrails provides important technical solutions to solve these problems. It provides tools and methods for better interoperability and use of standards. OSTrails helps to assess FAIRness better. Also, by making FAIRness assessment more transparent and possibly part of reward systems, OSTrails is important for encouraging good research practices and creating more reliable open science environment in social sciences and in EOSC. CESSDA believes OSTrails is key to move towards more consistent, transparent, and more impactful research.
-Can you provide some details on your pilot's main actors, services and priorities? How will your pilot adopt the results of OSTrails?
Our CESSDA pilot is a collaboration between CESSDA and its Service Providers from Finland (FSD), and the UK (UKDS). Main priority for this pilot is to improve interoperability and FAIRness of social science datasets in our infrastructure.
To do this, we are doing several things to integrate and adapt CESSDA services to OSTrails framework. First, we are working to make sure our vocabularies, CESSDA Vocabulary Service (CVS) and European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST), are compatible with DMP Interoperability Framework. This promotes standardised metadata.
Second, we prioritise metadata enrichment and validation. We will explore using information from other SKGs in our CESSDA SKG to make it more comprehensive and vice versa. Importantly, we are implementing validation tests to ensure metadata is complete and good quality in our SKG. We will use ELSST and CVS to have standardised values in dataset descriptions.
Finally, an important part is the integration of FAIR assessment. We will explore the possibility of integrating OSTrails' FAIR Assessment Tests in CESSDA Metadata Validator. This will let us give feedback to data providers about FAIRness of their datasets, to help them improve. By exposing metadata from CESSDA Data Catalogue (CDC) in SKG format, following SKG-IF (Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework) standard, we want to test ways to enrich our catalogue metadata, learning from other projects.
Adoption of OSTrails results is built into pilot design. We are directly using OSTrails components and methods in our core CESSDA services and workflows. Pilot results will directly influence the development of our services, enhancing their interoperability, FAIR-enabling, and better contribution to EOSC.
-Ongoing activities and Next Steps?
Currently, our focus is to adapt CESSDA services to work well with Interoperability Frameworks. This important work includes technical development, specifically making and integrating APIs for our SKG, CESSDA Vocabulary Service (CVS), and European Language Social Science Thesaurus (ELSST). These APIs are needed for interoperable data exchange and metadata harmonisation across our services and with external systems.
At the same time, we are actively building strategic collaborations. We are especially focusing on partnerships that ensure DMP tools use standardised metadata elements and defined vocabularies effectively. This collaboration is important to promote consistent and machine-actionable DMPs in social sciences.
Our next steps involve implementing metadata validation tests that we have developed. This will allow us to check and improve metadata quality and completeness in our SKG. Also, we will start experimenting with using metadata from other relevant SKGs. This enrichment should improve knowledge base and analysis capabilities of our CESSDA SKG.
Finally, we are committed to further define and strengthen our collaborations with other OSTrails pilots and developers of DMP tools. These collaborations are important to ensure OSTrails and its outputs are widely adopted and have good impact in EOSC.
