Explore the National Pilot Interview from Sweden to discover the latest updates on the OSTrails pilot studies. Dive into their national activities and learn about their progress in integrating open science with research assessment. This month, we had the pleasure of speaking with Johan Fihn Marberg and Olof Olsson from the Swedish National Data Service.

- Johan Fihn Marberg (Swedish National Data Service)		- Olof Olsson (Swedish National Data Service)

 "Participation in the OSTrails project will provide us with the opportunity to further increase the efficiency with which we can provide services to our end users."

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

The Swedish National Data Service (SND) is a national e-infrastructure co-funded by the Swedish Research Council and a consortium of nine universities and a network of almost 30 other universities and research organisations. SND provides researchers with a coordinated and quality assured system for finding, describing, and sharing research data.

SND has strong ties to EOSC as the representative organisation for the University of Gothenburg in the EOSC Association. SND is a designated competence center in Skills4EOSC and has members in various EOSC task forces and expert groups. 

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

At SND, one of our main focuses is to provide researchers with easy solutions for publishing research data. With interoperable solutions between publishing systems and local storage solutions at universities, we are trying to ease the administrative burden on researchers. In the OSTrails project, we can further enhance the interoperability and metadata exchange between the SND publishing platform, DMP tools and CRIS systems at universities. We are especially interested in exploring the possibility of offering researchers a publishing experience that allows them to reuse all the metadata they have already provided in previous stages of the research lifecycle.

-How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your country? 

In Sweden, data management plans (DMPs) are required when applying for funding from major funding agencies. However, although DMPs are assessed by some universities, not all have the capacity to do so, and there is no structured follow-up on how researchers comply with the contents of the DMPs.

SND has produced a checklist for DMPs, which is followed and recommended by several Swedish universities. In the project, this checklist will be provided as a template in a DMP tool provided by Swedish universities. 

Research data published in the SND research data catalogue is assessed annually using FAIR metrics tools. We will explore how the interoperability enhancements made in this pilot will increase the FAIR score of published digital objects in the catalogue.

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

SND provides a research data publishing platform (DORIS) and a research data catalogue. One of the integrations recently deployed in DORIS integrates SweCRIS to enable the import and linking of project and funding information when the researchers describe their data in DORIS. SweCRIS includes funding information from 13 funders and currently has about 60000 projects listed in the database from 2008 to 2024.

SND is currently building a new discovery portal, researchdata.se, for Swedish research data where we focus on machine readable metadata and providing best practices for metadata publishing to make research output as FAIR as possible. The researchdata.se portal, to be launched in early 2025, will provide a search portal for data from several Swedish research infrastructures as well as guides for data documentation and sharing.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps?   

We are currently working on implementing an integration between the DORIS system and the local DMP tool, based on DSWizard, at Chalmers Technical University to facilitate metadata exchange between the tools. We are also exploring ways to further this collaboration and increase awareness of OSTrails among other stakeholders in the Swedish research data landscape. 

SND is also currently developing a centralised maDMP index to enable metadata reuse from DMP tools when publishing research data in DORIS.

Thank you both!