On 5 February 2026, OSTrails participated in the EVERSE Community Engagement Event at CERN, Geneva. Elli Papadopoulou (Athena Research Center) presented the work on τηε OSTrails Commons to an audience of Research Software Engineers, researchers, and open science stakeholders from across Europe’s five EOSC Science Clusters.

EVERSE is a fellow Horizon Europe project building a European network for research software quality. The connection between the two projects runs deeper than a shared funding programme: Daniel Garijo (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) is an active contributor to both, bringing tools he has developed — notably FOOPS! and FAIR-OS — that are integrated into OSTrails’ FAIR assessment work while also informing EVERSE’s software quality framework. His involvement has been instrumental in ensuring that knowledge, approaches, and emerging standards flow actively between the two teams, and meant the conversation at CERN built on an already established foundation rather than starting from scratch.

EVERSE Notable Results

The event showcased key exploitable results from the EVERSE project. Two stood out as particularly relevant to the OSTrails community. 

• The RSQToolkit is a curated collection of tasks, tools, research software stories, and resources designed to support repeatability, reproducibility, and trustworthy software development and maintenance. 

• The TechRadar is a visual dashboard built on the RSQToolkit, helping practitioners navigate and apply its guidance in day-to-day software development work. 

Together, these outputs represent EVERSE’s approach to making software quality guidance actionable and community-driven.

OSTrails for open (source) research software

Our presentation focused on three areas of the OSTrails work most directly relevant to the research software quality community.

The Plan-Track-Assess Interoperability Frameworks and Commons: the standardised, open specifications that enable different tools, platforms, and communities to exchange information about data and software management in a consistent and machine-actionable way. We presented concrete examples of how these commons operate in practice across OSTrails pilots.

The DMP Evaluation Service, currently under active development as an open source project. This service enables automated assessment of Data Management Plans, including software (management) components, checking completeness and alignment with FAIR principles, and making DMP quality measurable and comparable at scale.

Software quality in OSTrails through two dedicated frameworks: 

• theFAIR Assessment Interoperability Framework (FAIR-IF), which provides a standardised vocabulary and reference model for producing consistent, comparable FAIR assessments across tools; 
• and the SKG Quality Toolbox, which connects entities like source code, workflows, scripts, and containers to the broader research ecosystem through our Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework, making software contributions traceable, assessable, and creditable across the research lifecycle.

Key points for collaboration

The discussions at CERN highlighted how two projects with distinct mandates can find genuine points of exchange. 

The two meet in what each identified as valuable in the other’s work: OSTrails’ FAIR assessment dimensions and software metadata quality indicators are directly relevant to how EVERSE measures and communicates software quality, while EVERSE’s quality guidance and metrics offer OSTrails a richer picture of what software quality means beyond FAIRness alone. Sharing metrics, aligning indicators, and building on each other’s open specifications is a natural next step.

The RSQToolkit’s quality guidance is a natural input to FAIR assessment: the indicators EVERSE has developed could be expressed as machine-actionable FAIR tests within the OSTrails FAIR-IF, enabling consistent application and cross-domain comparison. The TechRadar, as a structured catalogue of tools and practices, maps naturally onto OSTrails SKG Quality Toolbox — both are concerned with making software quality visible and navigable.

On the planning side, the DMP Evaluation Service and the OSTrails DMP Interoperability Framework offer EVERSE communities a path from informal software quality practices toward structured, interoperable Software Management Plans — connecting quality intent to verifiable evidence within the EOSC research infrastructure.

All OSTrails resources are openly available at docs.ostrails.eu and github.com/OSTrails.

We came back from Nice with a clear sense that OSTrails is hitting the right notes. The third edition of the EOSC Winter School (27–29 January) brought together over 170 participants from across the EOSC community, and for the OSTrails representatives it was the perfect setting to test whether our Interoperability Frameworks resonate with the people who would need to use them.

 Hint: They do! 

The brokerage event changed how we talk about OSTrails

The EOSC Stakeholder Brokerage Event on 27 January was structured as a matchmaking session: 10-minute meetings with EOSC Node representatives, one table per Node. The new 3fold OSTrails leaflet was prepared specifically for this event, which made all the difference. Instead of launching into explanations about what DMP-IF, SKG-IF, and FAIR-IF are supposed to do, we could hand people something, point to specific parts, and have an actual conversation.

Striking was the diversity of where different Nodes are in their journey, and how OSTrails speaks to each of them differently:

 Breakout sessions: presenting, learning, and pushing back

DMP-IF, SKG-IF, and FAIR-IF were co-created with input from over 80 research data management tools and are being tested across 24 pilots in national, institutional, and thematic contexts. OSTrails participated in the Winterschool to make the case that these frameworks belong in the Federation's toolkit, and to offer our ongoing collaboration with the Task Forces on Semantic Interoperability and FAIR Metrics & Digital Objects to help make that happen.

OSTrails contributed to the thematic track sessions 1 and 3 to strengthen the understanding of the community needs, and where OSTrails might need to adjust.

Tomasz Miksa (Technische Universität Wien) presented the DMP‑IF in a lightning talk during Thematic Track 1, Session A. He focused on concrete examples demonstrating how the DMP‑IF can create value, highlighting three key points:

• DMP‑IF replaces—or at least reduces the need for—PDF-based data management plans.
• DMP‑IF acts as the “glue” between Research Data Management services.
• DMP‑IF helps prevent vendor lock‑in.
• He concluded his presentation by inviting the audience to suggest additional useful interactions that could support automation in Research Data Management, beyond those already identified by OSTrails. We still hope to receive this feedback—including from readers of this post.

Tomasz Miksa and Esteban González Guardia (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) also chaired Session B of Track 1, which was organised in a World Café format. This was the session with the highest participation in the entire Winter School, which made it particularly challenging to facilitate.

The format encouraged participants to learn from one another. Given the scale of the discussions and the broad distribution of topics, it was not feasible to define a concrete set of follow‑up actions—nor was this the intention. The purpose of the session was to stimulate exchange, and in that regard, it fully met its goal.

We also came with questions: things we've been running into in our pilots that don't have clear answers yet.

On FIPs (FAIR Implementation Profiles), this has been a longer conversation for us. Some of our pilots wanted to use FIPs, but we quickly ran into obstacles: they can't really be used outside the community they were designed for. The tooling, the assumptions, the ecosystem is very controlled and tied to one provider. We organised a meeting to try and find a way forward, which eventually led to the Dutch pilot taking this on. They are now producing a deliverable examining whether and how others can use FIPs, laying out the challenges and limitations honestly, and pointing to possible paths forward.

But there's a broader point here for us. OSTrails challenges the premise of FIPs to some extent: the information that FIPs capture is largely information we already have in Scientific Knowledge Graphs. So in our architecture, we position FIPs as components within the FAIR-IF—part of the assessment layer—rather than as a standalone solution. This reframing matters because it affects how communities should think about implementing FAIR: not as a parallel process, but as something integrated with how they already track and describe their research outputs.

These are ongoing discussions, and the Winter School was a good space to work through them together with the rest of the EOSC community.

One thing that keeps coming up, and came up again in Nice: everyone's situation is different, and it was good to hear it directly from Node representatives too. What works for a well-established national infrastructure won't work for a thematic community just getting organised. Our frameworks need to be modular enough to meet people where they are, and based on the feedback, we're on the right track.

What worked well

A small thing, but worth mentioning: having a physical leaflet to hand over changed how people engaged with us. They could flip through it, mark things, and take it back to their teams. It sounds obvious, but when you're explaining something as layered as three interconnected interoperability frameworks, having something tangible helps. We saw people walking around with it, showing it to colleagues. That's the kind of reach you don't get from a slide deck.

Read the Interview with the Thematic Pilot for Biodiversity to discover the latest updates on OSTrails pilot studies. Explore pilots progress in integrating open science principles and advancing research assessment. This month we had the pleasure of speaking with Joaquín López Lerida (LifeWatch ERIC Data e-Science) and Christos Arvanitidis (LifeWatch ERIC).

Christos Arvanitidis	Joaquín López Lerida

"OSTrailsprovides a unique opportunity to align LifeWatch ERIC’s biodiversity data infrastructure with emerging European standards for FAIRness, interoperability and machine-actionable DMPs. By integrating the OSTrails tools and frameworks into theour SKG-driven approach, greater visibility, traceability, and reuse of research outputs can be offered to the environmental sciences."

Can you briefly introduce your organisation(s)? How does it/do they contribute to EOSC?

LifeWatch ERIC is the European Research Infrastructure Consortium dedicated to biodiversity and ecosystem research. It contributes to EOSC through the development and provision of Virtual Research Environments (VREs), semantic tools, and data services that support open science, reproducibility, and cross-disciplinary collaboration. Our participation in EOSC focuses on enabling FAIR access to environmental data and analytical workflow

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

OSTrails offers a practical framework to link together Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), Data Management Plans (DMPs) and FAIR assessments in a unified, API-driven ecosystem. We're particularly excited about the opportunity to integrate LifeBlock, our biodiversity knowledge graph, with the DMP-IF and FAIR-IF pathways. This allows us to embed FAIRness into the research process itself, not just evaluate it post-hoc.

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

In biodiversity and ecosystem research, there is growing awareness of the need for machine-actionable planning and transparent metadata practices. However, adoption is still fragmented. Projects such as  OSTrails and infrastructures such as LifeWatch ERIC, are contributing to the development of community-aligned machine-actionable Data Management Plans (maDMPs), semantic annotation, and dataset-level FAIR assessments that can scale across European initiatives such as EOSC.

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

The LifeWatch ERIC focuses on: 

• Enrich the LifeBlock SKG with real-world datasets (e.g., from MARBEFES)

• Implement a maDMP template, to be deployed via ARGOS (https://argos.openaire.eu/)

• Link SKG entities to digital objects (DOs) with qualified references (QRs)

• Developing a real graphical environment for showing and reference SKG

• Applying FAIR assessment tools developed by WP3

LifeWatch aims to adopt OSTrails results by aligning with the SKG-IF, DMP-IF and FAIR IF (https://docs.ostrails.eu/en/update-restructure/architecture/intro.html), thereby ensuring that LifeWatch ERIC services remain interoperable, standards-compliant, and machine-readable.

 SKG tool which is being developed by LifeWatch ERIC

Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

LifeWatch  has: 

• Completed a first maDMP draft (uploaded to ARGOS)
• Designed the semantic structure of the LifeBlock SKG, based on previous tools (e.g. HGyOG)
• Selected pilot datasets from the MARBEFES project
• Begun mapping our metadata to SKG-IF and preparing FAIR assessment metrics

Next steps include: 

• Uploading the maDMP and testing API interactions
• Deploying the LifeBlock SKG front-end
• Running first-round FAIR assessments
• Providing feedback to WP1–3 to help refine metrics and interoperability models

At the EOSC Symposium 2025 in Brussels, nearly 500 participants from 36 countrieswitnessed a pivotal moment: the official launch of the EOSC Federation.The coordinators of 14 EOSC Nodes of the EOSC Federation joined President Klaus Tochtermann of the EOSC Association on stage to sign the Federation's Memorandum of Understanding amid confetti and fanfare. This festive moment marked took a decisive step for Europe's research infrastructural landscape: from vision to operational reality. 

EC Director-General Marc Lemaître captured the momentum: "Let's seize this moment! Let's act together to complete the EOSC Federation fast and make it the backbone of Europe's digital research and innovation ecosystem."

FAIR for AI: Consistency as the foundation

The symposium's "FAIR for AI" session brought together diverse perspectives on how FAIR principles intersect with AI systems, from technical interoperability to metadata standards and the evolving needs of AI researchers.

As Co-Chair of the EOSC FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects Task Force alongside Mark Wilkinson (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Elli Papadopoulou (Athena ResearchCenter) brought the conversation to a critical challenge: assessment consistency. We highlighted how assessment tools interpret FAIR principles differently, measure different aspects, and produce incompatible metrics.If two research teams can evaluate the same dataset and get wildly different scores (e.g. one at 85%, another at 62%)this can create a potential trust problem for the EOSC Federation.

The response from attendees was immediate and strong. Many shared their own experiences with inconsistent results and confusion around what "FAIR" actually means in practice. The Task Force has documented this through community surveys, and the session confirmed it resonates deeply across the research community.

OSTrails addresses this directly through the FAIR Interoperability Framework (FAIR-IF) and the FAIRness Reference Model, work that received specific attention because it tackles a gap everyone recognises. As the EOSC Federation is built up from multiple nodes needing to evaluate and exchange data, standardised interoperability and assessment frameworks and practices become foundational.

In the discussion also a harder truth surfaced. A dataset can score perfectly on FAIR metrics and still be biased. The dataset can have DOI, open license, standard formats, and rich metadata, but still carry information from limited demographic groups or lacking documentation of curation decisions and accountability trails which limits its AI readiness.

FAIR principles ensure technical accessibility and reusability. AI systems require additional dimensions like bias assessment, curation quality documentation, ethical context metadata, and accountability frameworks (Microsoft has labeled thisthe FATE principles: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, Ethics). OSTrails ensures the FAIR part is reliable and consistent, so that where FAIR and FATE intersect, there's a trustworthy foundation to build on.

Standards in action

 The lightning talk sessions transformed principles into practice. Jakub Jirka from Codevence demonstrated their DMP platform, including a first implementation of the DMP evaluation service that Athena Research Center and TU Wien are co-developing as part of OSTrails. The demonstration showed machine-actionable workflows that help researchers achieve FAIR compliance while addressing quality, bias, and ethical dimensions.

What’s Coming

The EOSC Federation launched with 14 nodes, with more nodes on the way. OSTrails is timely entering its implementation phase where frameworks are becoming operational reality.

Over the coming months, the project pilots will demonstrate how the OSTrailsinteroperability standards work across national, institutional, and domain-specific infrastructures, some of which are already building their Node to be part of the Federation. Stay Tuned!