Launching the EOSC EU Node

The EOSC Symposium 2024 in Berlin marked the launch of the EOSC EU Node which serves as the first step towards the EOSC federation. Held in hybrid mode, it brought together thousands of participants representing key stakeholders from across Europe to advance the Open Science infrastructure. Special attention was given to the FAIR principles' adoption particularly for their relevance to AI research applications that support the vision towards the “Web of FAIR data and services”.

Partners’ Contribution

OSTrails joined the event alongside other EOSC projects and initiatives, contributing to critical discussions on enhancing data interoperability and FAIR principles within the EOSC ecosystem. Active involvement included a presentation by Elli Papadopoulou, deputy coordinator, in the collaborative unconference session on the Scientific Knowledge Graph - Interoperability Framework (SKG-IF), and a poster presentation by Tomasz Miksa, technical manager, aimed at engaging the EOSC community and gathering feedback on ongoing work.

Highlights from the SKG-IF session

Elli’s presentation, titled "Steps towards FAIRness, Interconnectivity, and Machine Actionability Across All Research Phases," underscored OSTrails’ efforts to support Open Science practices through the SKG-IF framework. She illustrated how OSTrails applies FAIR principles to ensure that research data and metadata are interoperable and machine actionable. The talk emphasised OSTrails’ contribution to the SKG-IF with more entities that can be then further exploited for assessment, such as services/instruments used to generate data in research infrastructures and costs for Research Data Management available in DMPs.

Elli Papadopoulou presenting at the Unconference Session.

Discussion

Key questions posed during the Q&A session provided the opportunity to clarify several aspects and yielded constructive comments from participants. Among them was the definition of “digital objects” used in the context of OSTrails which is not equivalent to FDOs. 

“Digital Objects can be broadly defined as “a sequence of bits identified by a persistent identifier and described by metadata” (D1.1: Plan-Track-Assess Pathways, after: Berg-Cross et al. 2015; Schwardmann 2020; De Smedt et al. 2020)”.

Overall, the discussion focused on the necessity of the SKG-IF—whether existing standards like Dublin Core, DataCite, or Scholix suffice for interoperability—and called for clarity on ownership, given multiple projects involved. It is important to cover various research outputs, not just publications, and ensuring it aligns with Semantic Web principles, using ontologies and schemas like DCAT or PROV. Compliance with EU regulations, especially under EOSC's "Data Space," is equally essential, as is SKG-IF’s support for Open Science goals through harmonised APIs and efficient federated data search, enabling cross-European collaboration.

Post-Unconference Session Discussion.

Community Discussions that Broaden Collaborations

During lunch breaks, Tomasz presented the project’s poster showcasing current developments with the SKG, FAIR and DMP Interoperability Frameworks and the pathways supporting their implementation. This informal setting provided a great opportunity to interact with a diverse audience and explain the complexity of the project in simple terms. Conversations with participants highlighted the key contributions of the project, particularly the role of commons in fostering collaboration and resource sharing within the broader EOSC community. They also spurred connections with service providers outside OSTrails who were welcome to participate in future events of the project aiming at harmonisation for wider adoption of our results.

Engaging Conversations on Project Developments with Tomasz.

Link to the presentation: Papadopoulou_Steps-towards-FAIRness-interconnectivity-a.pdf

Unconference session slides: EOSC collaborative frontiers to achieve interoperability and enhance scholarly data

Unconference session recording: EOSC Symposium | Unconference | EOSC collaborative frontiers to achieve interoperability and ...

Link to the poster: OSTrails: Delivering the Commons to Plan - Track - Assess research in EOSC

Clusters and Research Infrastructures (RIs) are fundamental to OSTrails, enabling collaboration, data sharing, and resource integration across scientific disciplines. These infrastructures provide researchers with access to shared data and computational resources, fostering cross-disciplinary projects and broadening access to essential tools. Clusters ensure that research results and datasets remain compatible and interoperable, with RIs developing standards that facilitate data sharing and streamline collaboration, especially in large-scale projects. 

By promoting open science principles, clusters and RIs make scientific data more accessible, transparent, and reusable, aligning closely with OSTrails' commitment to the FAIR principles. In addition, RIs support scientific innovation and sustainability through skills development programmes that enable researchers to use advanced methods and tools effectively.

Recently, several OSTrails partners from the SSHOC science cluster co-authored a poster that highlights the critical role of science clusters within OSTrails—contributing both to the project’s conceptual framework and the achievement of its overarching goals. At the recent CLARIN Annual Conference 2024, OSTrails SSHOC partners presented this poster during the Bazaar sessions, spotlighting the transformative potential of Scholarly Knowledge Graphs (SKGs) in promoting FAIR principles across the research landscape.

The poster underscored the urgent need to enhance the discoverability and interoperability of diverse research outputs and infrastructures. While existing SKG implementations and initiatives—such as the OpenAIRE Graph, OpenCitations, and DataCite/PID Graph— primarily focus on Digital Objects (DOs) like publications, the OSTrails project takes a unique approach by recognising the importance of capturing additional research context. Beyond traditional DOs, it emphasises the inclusion of critical components like processing services and equipment that significantly contribute to scientific outputs. This initiative underscores OSTrails’ commitment to a holistic, interdisciplinary knowledge framework, developed in collaboration with CLARIN, SSHOC, and other science clusters, to broaden the scope of open and connected research infrastructures.

Read the National Pilot Interview from Germany 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 Jochen Johannsen and Dominik Schmitz from the RWTH Aachen University Library. Enjoy!

- Jochen Johannsen	- Dominik Schmitz

“By adopting the interoperability measures taken by the OSTrails project the DMP tool RDMO – widespread in Germany – can overcome the limitations of a national silo as well as benefit from the integrations with other tools – even beyond repositories and CRIS – to really make data management a tool to support research instead of just a burden.”

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

RWTH Aachen University is one of the largest technical universities in Germany with a strong focus on natural and engineering sciences. Accordingly, we also participate with a leading part in NFDI4ING and NFDI4Chem – two consortia of the National Research Data Infrastructure in Germany (NFDI) focussing on engineering and chemistry.  Additionally, we actively contribute to the NFDI's foundational services, particularly through the Research Data Management Organizer (RDMO), a widely adopted data management planning tool in Germany that is central to our involvement in OSTrails. Through our engagement with the NFDI, we aim to enhance our contributions to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) beyond our individual efforts at RWTH Aachen University.

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

Delivering a data management plan (DMP) without deriving any benefit during the actual research process can feel burdensome. We strongly believe that machine actionable DMPs are a way to overcome this situation. Thus, we pursue this goal by offering to integrate the RDMO tool with platforms used in engineering and chemistry, including repositories and electronic lab notebooks. In addition, we hope that the interoperability framework developed by OSTrails will facilitate integration with many additional tools beyond our initial focus. If successful, this approach will break down silos and provide comprehensive assistance to our researchers.

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

In 2015, the German Science Foundation (DFG) started to fund the development of a tool to support data management planning.  Following a successful second funding phase that concluded in 2020, the Research Data Management Organizer (RDMO) was established and quickly adopted by several universities and institutes. In 2024, RDMO entered the first of three phases to be recognized as a prospective base service of the national research data infrastructure by means of the DMP4NFDI project.

Over time, we have observed a gradual increase in acceptance, driven by the implementation of individual discipline-specific templates, as well as the provision of software management planning and the German Science Foundation checklist as templates within this open platform. At RWTH Aachen University, we have noticed that large projects particularly value DMPs as effective tools for tracking subprojects and ensuring alignment. Common decisions of a project are embedded by altering templates and answering options thereby helping to alleviate the burden of filling out a DMP. While integration with other research tasks and systems is still in its early stages, initial attempts are being made to access DMPs via API for analysis. Although this cannot yet be considered a full assessment, it does represent an important step toward monitoring.

By offering the RDMO tool as a hosted service with a common database within the DMP4NFDI project, we aim to support interoperable templates that are compatible both within and across different scientific domains. This approach will also establish a solid foundation for developing effective assessment criteria for DMPs and the digital objects they describe.

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

The national pilot for Germany builds on the data management planning tool (RDMO) that originates in the scientific community, since it was funded by the German Science foundation. This tool is currently being established as a base service of the national research data infrastructure in Germany (NFDI) via the DMP4NFDI project. 

Beyond RWTH Aachen University, our collaboration partners are the technical university of Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) and ZBMed, the information centre for life sciences. The aim is to onboard as many discipline-specific consortia of the NFDI as possible. NFDI4Ing (engineering) and NFDI4Chem (chemistry) have been chosen to showcase the integration with other tools namely Chemotion and eLabFTW, an electronic lab notebook platform. By building on the interoperability framework that OSTrails aims for, we aim to establish these integrations swiftly. If successful, we anticipate extending this interoperability framework to facilitate similar integrations across other national and thematic pilots, enabling the rapid expansion of machine-actionable DMPs to support additional consortia effectively.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

During the first half of the OSTrails project, the major task of a national pilot is to promote the OSTrails project to local services and stakeholders and of course to learn about the findings and developments of the basic working packages to evaluate their effect on the national infrastructure. To this end, we are in touch with both the developer and user community of the central RDMO DMP tool, as well as the working group infra-DMP of the national research data infrastructure NFDI.

Through the DMP4NFDI project, which is funded by the NFDI, we aim to establish RDMO as a fundamental service in Germany, supported by helpdesk services and template management. At the same time, we are working to develop a sustainable funding and support infrastructure for the ongoing enhancement of the tool.

We look forward to learning about OSTrails interoperability framework to be ready to start our integrations with other tools as soon as it becomes available.

Read the National Pilot Interview from Spain 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 Diana Furcila and Pilar Rico – Castro from the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT). Enjoy!

 

"Our research ecosystem will be enhanced by standardizing Data Management Plans, improving metadata quality, and integrating automated tools for quality and content assessment. All these developments will improve the national alignment with the scientific FAIR principles, facilitate the collaboration between researchers at both national and international level, and impact the overall quality of Spanish scientific outputs."

-Can you briefly introduce your organisations? How do they contribute to EOSC?

The Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, F.S.P. (FECYT) is a public foundation attached to the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities. Thanks to this collaboration, 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.  

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. Its focus is on facilitating metadata interoperability at the national level and providing access, visibility and impact to scientific research outputs. RECOLECTA provides several services to the national community of open access repositories such as metadata validation, metadata enrichment, quality assessment, harvesting, usage statistics, and a search engine.  

Regarding EOSC, FECYT represents Spain at the EOSC Steering Board together with the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, it participated in EOSC Future, and it belongs to several Open Science initiatives that will be part of the EOSC federated nodes like OPERAS AISBL and OpenAIRE. FECYT’s contribution to EOSC includes enhancing metadata quality and facilitating interoperability among repositories, which aligns with EOSC's objectives of promoting accessible and reusable research data. 

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

Scientific policies in Spain are still evolving, and our pilot in OSTrails aims to contribute to a more structured and measurable scientific approach aligned with international standards. Regulating Data Management Plans (DMPs), improving metadata quality, and developing tools for quality assessment and certification is a key action to the enhancement of the Research Data Management (RDM) practices and the scientific overall quality content. This is a basic requirement for Open Science policies to run smoothly. 

Furthermore, this pilot will also enhance our own validation processes, and it will represent a guarantee that both metadata and content quality assessments evolve among standards in the European research ecosystem.

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

Beneficiaries of R&D projects from the National Research Agency (AEI) must ensure that research results, including publications, data, software, and methodologies are available in open access and deposited upon publication in repositories according to Article 37 of Law 14/2011 (reviewed in 2022) and to Article 12 of the Universities Spanish Organic Law 2/2023. These results must adhere to FAIR principles to facilitate validation and reusability. In addition, the National Open Science Strategy (ENCA) calls for RDM to follow FAIR principles and foster open science practices at public R&D funding.

However, there has been no formal measurement of the implementation of these policies yet. This is where OSTrails national pilot will play a key role, by integrating FAIR principles into national systems and developing quality assessment criteria for DMPs in collaboration with the National Research Agency (AEI).

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

Our pilot involves key actors, such as our national repository community -and their researchers- as well as the AEI.  In collaboration with the AEI, we will first analyze the minimum quality criteria for Data Management Plans (DMPs) to be applied during the assessment process. To simplify the evaluation of DMP content, we aim to develop a natural language processing (NLP) tool for our funder, significantly reducing the administrative burden of research assessments. Additionally, the DMP content will be easily updated and monitored throughout the project lifecycle. 

Next, we will validate and enhance the quality of DMPs through RECOLECTA’s metadata validation service. We prioritize developing a standardized DMP template based on ARGOS, validating DMP metadata, and linking DMPs to key research artifacts. 

Our goal is to ensure that data is accessible, interoperable, and reusable across different systems and platforms. Improved technology will positively impact data repositories, enhancing national collaboration and integration into future broader initiatives.

Therefore, by adopting OSTrails results, we will establish a solid framework for national open access policies that align with international best practices. 

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

Currently, we are in an initiation phase which includes an optimization of the technical infrastructure of our metadata validation tool while analyzing the main requirements of a DMP in our national environment. Meanwhile, we will collaborate with the AEI to also establish the DMP quality assessment criteria. These criteria will be integrated into the requirements for beneficiaries, and we plan to help researchers and institutions by providing guidance on DMP FAIR principles and its content quality. 

Looking ahead, our next steps also include the implementation of an NLP-based tool for automated DMP evaluation, which will help to reduce administrative burdens and offer additional benefits to the research community.