“By participating in OSTrails, we are strengthening the foundations for a research environment where systems, institutions, and disciplines work together more seamlessly. It brings us closer to a landscape where FAIR principles are not just ideals, but embedded in everyday practice.”
Can you briefly introduce your organisation(s)? How does it/do they contribute to EOSC?
Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research is the national agency responsible for digital infrastructure, data management, and shared services for Norway's higher education and research sector. Sikt operates core services including identity and access management, data storage, network infrastructure, and support for research data management across Norwegian universities and research institutions.
Sikt contributes to EOSC through active participation in several European projects and initiatives. A key area of contribution is expertise in international interoperability standards, which is essential for integrating research data across systems and unlocking greater value from data at the European level. In 2025, Sikt has participated in EOSC Association working groups on Technical and Semantic Interoperability and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), providing early insight into European development processes, real opportunities for influence, and a strategic position in the advancement of open science in Europe.
We are furthermore working to establish the foundations for a Norwegian national EOSC node, with the aim of connecting Norwegian research infrastructure and services to the EOSC Federation. Our ambition is to build on existing Norwegian services to deliver real value to Norwegian researchers while contributing to the shared European research data commons.
What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to?
We are excited about OSTrails and the opportunity to help put the FAIR principles into practice in a concrete and practical way. OSTrails provides a real chance to turn those principles into everyday workflows that researchers, institutions, and services can actually use.
We are especially looking forward to contributing to a common framework that works across tools, systems, and even national borders. Research data moves through so many platforms and services, and aligning dataflows and workflows across all of them is both a challenge and a huge opportunity. If we can create standardised, interoperable processes, we not only make the ecosystem more robust but also reduce duplication of effort and confusion for researchers.
Ultimately, making necessary reporting processes more streamlined, efficient, and coherent. When the infrastructure works well, it frees up time and resources for more important things, like producing highquality research and enabling others to build on it.
We see OSTrails as an important stepping stone towards a more FAIR research landscape, and towards much better utilisation of research results in the long run.
How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your country/scientific domain?
Norwegian institutions, the Research Council of Norway (RCN), and other national actors operate a wide range of activities, tools, and services for planning, tracking, and assessing research. In response to a coordinated initiative from major Norwegian institutions, Sikt is currently piloting a new national DMP service to support a more standardised and coordinated approach to research planning and tracking. We are working to integrate this service with Sikt’s core systems as well as other relevant national and international services.
One key component in this ecosystem is the new Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA), a joint national CRIS and publication repository that recently replaced Cristin as the reporting tool for all publicly funded research institutions in Norway. In addition to NVA, several other services and initiatives contribute to tracking, monitoring, and assessing Norwegian research. Such as annual RCN reporting processes, the Open Access Barometer (currently preparing for an overhaul), NOR‑CAM, and others.
