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.

From 13 to 14 March 2025, the OSTrails consortium convened in Athens for its first General Assembly—a key milestone that marked OSTrails’ transition from early development to integrated implementation and broader adoption. With over 65 participants attending in person and many more joining online, the hybrid event brought the entire consortium together to consolidate technical progress, share lessons from early pilot deployments, and agree on shared priorities for the months ahead. Preceded by a day of hackathons and working sessions on pilots and training, the Assembly served as a milestone for both operational alignment and community-driven development.

Key Outcomes of the Assembly

• Completion of all key Year One outputs, including the first versions of the Reference Architecture, Plan–Track–Assess Framework, Interoperability Frameworks (DMP-IF, SKG-IF, FAIR-IF), Commons, FAIRness Reference Model, DMP Evaluation Rubric.

• key technical components revision based on pilot and hackathon input.

• Timelines for the DMP Evaluation Service and HE Pilot.

• Alignment on shared templates and benchmarks for pilot implementation.

• Launch of a capacity-building programme with Mentorship and Webinars.

• Commitment to EOSC alignment and community-driven development.

A Look Back: What We Discussed 

Day 1 focused on the project’s core technical components, including updates on Interoperability Frameworks, the Reference Architecture, and the Plan–Track–Assess model. Discussions covered practical progress on maDMP API, SKG extensions, and FAIR test result structures. Day 2 shifted to coordination and adoption, highlighting the Horizon Europe pilot, the upcoming DMP Evaluation Service, and engagement with EOSC Nodes. Across both days, partners were highly engaged—sharing lessons from pilots, asking sharp questions, and clearly driving the project forward together.

Key Achievements from Year One 

During the Assembly, presentations from the technical leads highlighted a major milestone for the project: the release of the first version of the OSTrails Toolkit. The Toolkit now provides a structured foundation for the project’s vision of integrated, interoperable research data workflows. This includes the Plan–Track–Assess Framework (D1.1), which maps how digital objects can be managed, evaluated, and improved across their lifecycle, and the Reference Architecture (D1.4, outlining how DMPs, SKGs, and FAIR tools connect in automated, vendor-neutral ways. At the core are the three Interoperability Frameworks—DMP-IF, SKG-IF, and FAIR-IF (D1.4)—each designed to promote alignment and consistency across platforms. Additional components include the OSTrails Commons (D2.5), a growing set of open and reusable resources; the FAIRness Reference Model (D1.2), which offers guidance for FAIR adoption across research stages; and the DMP Evaluation Rubric (D3.1), which defines how the quality of DMPs can be assessed in a structured and transparent way.

Implementing Interoperability 

Equipped with the first version of the OSTrails Toolkit, the community came together in three hackathons held just before the Assembly—targeting FAIR assessment workflows, maDMPs, and SKGs—to build on this progress and test key components in practice. The energy during the hackathons, as well as in the plenary discussions, reflected a shared excitement, particularly around the potential of DMPs as actionable tools and the growing need for FAIR benchmarks to be adopted by infrastructures like OpenAIRE and research institutes. 

• The DMP Hackathon gathered international developers—including several from outside Europe—to advance the maintenance of the RDA Common Standard and initiate a common maDMP API.

• The FAIR hackathon convened developers from various FAIR related platforms and tools, focused on aligning assessment services and harmonising benchmark formats and APIs.

• The SKG Hackathon, pushed forward SKG interoperability through OpenAPI enhancements and metadata modeling.

These sessions helped surface integration challenges, align technical directions, and lay the groundwork for upcoming tool releases and framework updates.

Pilot Progress

Pilot use cases presented during the Assembly showed how OSTrails tools are being tested and embedded in real contexts. Pilots from Finland, Poland, the Netherlands, CESSDA, ESRF, and ENVRI demonstrated applications such as enriching DMPs with live metadata, conducting FAIR assessments in disciplinary workflows, and aligning institutional infrastructures with project frameworks. Feedback from these pilots is now feeding directly into tool refinement and API evolution.

Building Community Capacity

The importance of training and outreach was also central to the discussions. To support both foundational understanding and hands-on implementation of OSTrails technologies, the project has launched the Training Corner. This serves as a centralised, continuously evolving platform that hosts a growing collection of high-quality learning materials (learning resources, online Courses, mentorship programs, bootcamps), covering project’s core components such as DMPs, SKGs, and FAIR assessment tools and services.

What’s Next

Technical Milestones

To advance core components, the next round of OSTrails hackathons—scheduled for May/June 2025— will focus on refining the maDMP API, extending SKG-IF with new entities (e.g., Instruments, RAiD), and enhancing FAIR-IF with better benchmark and metadata support. Outputs from these hackathons, combined with early pilot feedback, will inform the revision of the Reference Architecture and all three Interoperability Frameworks by the end of Year 2, ensuring they are scalable, coherent, and responsive to real-world needs.

In parallel, OSTrails will release a prototype of the DMP Evaluation Service by Month 20. This semi-automated tool will assess DMPs across multiple dimensions—completeness, feasibility, quality, and policy compliance.

From Pilots to Policy

As pilots consolidate use cases, they will directly contribute to refining APIs, evaluation metrics, and implementation guidance. A shared DMP template, based on the Horizon Europe model, will be co-developed to support platforms, funders, and research teams across diverse national and disciplinary contexts. This will help bridge technical outputs with funder expectations and ensure greater transferability and policy alignment.

From the Community to the Community

To scale adoption and engagement, OSTrails will launch several capacity-building initiatives:

• An online course on (ma)DMPs will be piloted at the end of 2025, with full release in early 2026.

• The OSTrails Mentorship Programme will run from June 2025 to May 2026, offering hands-on support to research support staff, funders, and infrastructure managers.

• An OSTrails webinar series will begin in April 2025, showcasing project outputs and pilot experiences:

• 15 April: Introducing OSTrails: Your Companion to Streamline Planning, Tracking, and Assessing Research Practices.

• 28–30 April: Dedicated sessions on the Interoperability Frameworks (FAIR-IF, DMP-IF, SKG-IF).

Throughout the year, OSTrails will be featured at major events including LIBER, OSFAIR, and its first Bootcamp (late 2025), aimed at training institutional adopters.

Conclusions

The 2025 General Assembly marked OSTrails’ shift from building infrastructure to enabling widespread adoption. Backed by strong technical foundations and growing adoption, OSTrails enters Year Two with momentum and a clear role in shaping research data practices across Europe.

The OSTrails project (https://ostrails.eu/) is dedicated to enhancing FAIRness, interconnectivity and machine actionability across the Planning, Tracking and Assessing phases of research. Our consortium unites senior experts in Data Management Plans (DMPs), Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), and FAIR Assessment, offering a unique opportunity to share their expertise and knowledge with peers.

We are excited to announce the launch of our Mentorship Programme, designed to foster learning and skill development in the core areas of our project. Participants will benefit from personalised guidance, support, and the sharing of experiences from leading experts in the field.

Why Join?

• Expert Guidance: Learn directly from senior experts;
• Skill Development: Enhance your abilities in key project pillars (DMPs, SKGs, FAIR Assessment);
• Networking: Connect with peers and professionals in the field;
• Personalised Support: Receive tailored advice and mentorship.

Individual or Group programme

This mentorship programme is targeting individual participating, but we also allow teams participation from the same institution.

Learning objectives

By participating in the mentorship programme, participants will:

• Improve specific technical or soft skills in the targeted topic (DMP, SKG, or FAIR Assessment);
• Learn about best practices, and insights from the expert's experience;
• Develop the ability to adopt best practices and to implement the OSTrails services and specifications;
• Expand their professional network.

How it works

• Duration: June 2025 to May 2026 (monthly peer meetings).
• Format: one-to-one and group-based.
• Activities: Participation in one kick-off meeting (1h with mentors and mentees) and regular meetings with mentors (1h/1h30).

Important dates

• Applications: March 31st – April 25th May 9th
• Mentee’s selection and notification: May 5th
• Kick-off of the Mentorship programme: June
• Mentorship programme: June 2025 to May 2026

Who can join

• Open to those who want to know more about Data Management Plans, Scientific Knowledge Graphs, and FAIR Assessment;
• Targeted to IT infrastructure managers, Research support staff and Funders' support officers seeking to advance their skills (from competence centres and training initiatives of the European Research Area and ESFRI RIs. Priority will be given to OSTrails pilots.)

How to apply

Interested in joining our mentorship program?

Apply for our mentorship program here

Application deadline: April 25th.

Have doubts? This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Read the Inteview with the Astronomy & Particle Physics 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 Baptiste Cecconi, astronomer at Observatoire de Paris.

- Baptiste Cecconi

"With the Astronomy pilot in OSTrails, we will enhance the community open science practices, with more efficient data management, common interfaces to our registries and fine-tuned FAIR assessments tailored to our ecosystem."

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

Observatoire de Paris is the largest astronomy institution in France, gathering a third of the French astronomy community. Its teams participate in many national, European, and international projects (ground-based observatories, space-borne missions, numerical modeling, etc.). Observatoire de Paris is also a leading institution in astronomy interoperability alliances: at the time of writing 4 of the 10 working leads of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance are from the observatory, and the same level of engagement is also true with the International Planetary Data Alliance and the International Heliophysics Data Environment Alliance. Observatoire de Paris is also a member of the EOSC Association and has been testing EOSC provided tools since 2018. Thanks to those activities and the participation in the ESCAPE project, we are now in two EOSC projects (FAIR-IMPACT and OSTrails), as well as two OSCARS cascading grant projects. For us, EOSC is an opportunity to enhance our open science practices, as well as to train our community in scalable and open digital infrastructures.

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

Astronomy is often considered a mature community thanks to its long-lasting open science practices and interoperability policies. Despite over two decades of development of protocols and tools that have provided the astronomy community with a very efficient open data infrastructure, we remain in a siloed situation, addressing the challenges of open science in very specific ways. For instance, FAIR assessment tools are currently not able to evaluate the FAIRness of our resources. In OSTrails, our main goal is to enhance our open science practices, for example, by integrating our resource registry as a Scientific Knowledge Graph (SKG) with other OSTrails tools and by developing FAIR metrics and profiles, ensuring that our specific tools are included in the FAIR assessment.

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

Major astronomy projects involve partners from many countries from all over the world. This is mainly driven by the cost of these infrastructures, which can’t be afforded by a single country. On the one hand, international organisations such as the ESO (European Southern Observatory), or the ESA (European Space Agency) provide a framework for planning research, which can be a burden in terms of documentation for project members. On the other hand, tracking and assessing is not really organised on a large scale. There are citation and acknowledgment policies for publications, and funders are crawling repositories to find statements mentioning the projects. The assessment of the resources is done by the IVOA registry group, monitoring the interfaces’ conformance to the specifications. This applies only to resources served using IVOA protocols. Furthermore, linking scholarly publications to datasets and services providing access to those datasets is not yet a common practice in our community, although provenance metadata is gaining interest in many projects. 

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

The Astronomy pilot in OSTrails is developed at Observatoire de Paris. It covers the three pillars of OSTrails: plan, track and assess. It is also splited into two sub-pilots (radio astronomy on the one hand, and high-energy astrophysics on the other hand), so that we make sure that the prototyping is generic enough. 

The radio astronomy sub-pilot will be developed using the MASER repository, whose research products cover the three astronomy alliances’ scopes. The high-energy astrophysics sub-pilot concerns the CTA (Cherenkov Telescope Array) data management, which has very specific needs in terms of provenance management.

The details of the pilot are described below according to each OSTrails pillar.

Plan. At Observatoire de Paris, we started to develop a Data Management Plan (DMP) template back in 2016, with the EPN2020RI project. From the beginning, we were willing to make our DMP useful, so that it is not just a report to funders and thus seen as a burden to the science teams. We included many aspects and metadata that are required for us to efficiently manage the life cycle of the research data, e.g., we not only list the specific protocol used to share the data, but we also include metadata, which allows us to deploy the service. 

Track. Astronomy data alliances have their own registries of resources, with specific interfaces to access them. Celestial astronomy has its own specific database and protocol and is sharing metadata concerning data access services. Planetary astronomy mostly shares archived products, focusing on the technical reusability of data files in the long term, rather than interoperability. Heliophysics provides an XML-based registry listing various types of products (from instruments to numerical data), but without a specific API. OSTrails gives us the opportunity to set up a common interface and abstract those independent registries as knowledge graphs. 

Assess. As previously mentioned, we have tools to assess the conformance of our interfaces to our specifications. It is part of the IVOA governance to require validators for any proposed recommendation. This ensures that our infrastructure is up and running. In OSTrails, we have two objectives in FAIR assessment: the first is to foster the improvement of our resources’ FAIRness, using the commonly accepted FAIR criteria (e.g., use of persistent identifiers, use of ontology/thesauri URIs, etc); and the second is to include in the FAIR assessment our specific interfaces and policies. 

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

We are now testing DSW and have started implementing knowledge models and templates matching our requirements. Our first findings and results are very promising, and other teams at the observatory are already interested in implementing the tool. 

Concerning the connection to our community registries, we have not yet started actual developments, but we are involved in the RDA SKG-IF working group. We have proposed to add a new type of resource, which is a “Data Access Service”, since that’s mostly all we have in the IVOA registry. 

I was nominated as a FAIRsharing champion for Astronomy last month, and I am now reviewing and adding records in FAIRsharing that we will use for our FAIR assessment tests. The connection to our service validation tools is yet to be developed.

We realize that our pilot in OSTrails is ambitious, but we really think that most of the puzzle pieces are already there. Most of the work will consist in assembling the right pieces and using the right glue to achieve our goals and providing a useful set of tools for our community.