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
• 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, 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.

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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. 

Background

The EOSC Winter School 2025, held from January 20 to 23 in Seville, Spain, brought together 150 participants, including representatives from Horizon Europe EOSC-related projects, EOSC Opportunity Area Expert Groups, EOSC-A Task Forces, the European Commission, and the EOSC-A Board and Secretariat. Organized by the EOSC Association, the event aimed to align work plans, leverage project results, and explore strategies to support the build-up phase of the EOSC Federation. OSTrailers were there to communicate project findings and collaborate in aligning with other projects and initiatives on the EOSC strategic pillars:

• Sustaining and enhancing the EOSC Federation.

• Contributing to the web of FAIR data and the uptake of AI.

• Ensuring research security and sovereignty.

• Linking with other Common European Data Spaces and beyond.

Highlights from our contributions.

The OSTrails Interoperability Framework was recognised in several sessions as a cornerstone in the standardisation of FAIRness, and machine-actionability of Data Management Plans (DMPs). The FAIRness Reference Model was equally acknowledged as necessary in harmonising assessment results and ensuring the FAIRness of scholarly data, facilitating its integration into knowledge graphs, and enabling AI-driven research. 

Overall, OSTrails’ contributions were showcased across multiple sessions. Mark Wilkinson and Elli Papadopoulou, co-chairs of the EOSC-A FAIR Metrics and Digital Objects TF, along with Daniel Garijo actively contributed on FAIR metrics, digital objects, and scholarly communication. They led sessions and engaged in discussions around the integration of FAIR data and AI or the opportunities of SKGs going beyond publications. More OSTrailers were present in Seville contributing to other joint sessions presented at the event (check the photo for some hints!).

Looking ahead.

As we celebrate one year since our project’s launch, we are stepping forward with greater maturity and common understanding of the diversity of national and domain specific research ecosystems. Our experience over the past months has deepened our knowledge of how the Plan-Track-Assess (PTA) framework can integrate in such settings while also enhancing the emerging EOSC Nodes and contributing to EOSC's evolving interoperability framework. In fact, we attend to seeing our efforts adopted by EOSC Nodes in the form of blueprints for Planning, Tracking, and Assessing research.

Tune in!

Explore our latest deliverables and developments available at our Zenodo community. Find key outputs fresh-off-the-oven, like D1.2 FAIRness Reference Model for Digital Objects V1, D1.4 OSTrails Interoperability Reference Architecture V1, D2.5 OSTrails Commons Specifications, and D3.1 DMP Evaluation Rubric and Service Specifications, D5.3 Training Roadmap, Framework and Delivery of Training Library and Competence Centre V1. Subscribe to our Newsletter for more!

HOSI 2024: A Milestone for Open Science

The 3rd Open Science Symposium, organized by the Hellenic Open Science Initiative (HOSI), took place in December 2024 in Athens. Supported by key Greek ministries, the event gathered researchers, policymakers, and industry experts to explore strategies for strengthening Open Science in Greece. A central theme was enhancing national coordination in Open Science policies, addressing challenges in policy implementation, institutional collaboration, and long-term sustainability.

OSTrails’ Role and Contributions

As part of its mission to foster interoperability and FAIRness in research, OSTrails actively participated in the symposium, presenting its Greek pilot in a dedicated poster session. The session highlighted OSTrails' contributions to Open Science infrastructure in Greece and its alignment with European initiatives.

Led by HEAL-Link and ARC—both key contributors to HOSI—with support from CITE SA, the Greek pilot showcased advancements in data repository interoperability. By leveraging the OpenAIRE Graph, the pilot enhances metadata enrichment and integrates repositories with tools that support FAIR data management. Key objectives of the OSTrails Greek Pilot include:

• Optimizing workflows for Research Data Management.

• Enhancing collaboration between researchers, institutions, and funders

• Boosting FAIR data output and Open Science adoption at a national level

At the core of these efforts is the P-T-A Framework, developed and continuously refined within OSTrails. This framework contributes to EOSC’s evolving interoperability model, ensuring seamless access and sharing of scientific data and services across research communities, institutions, countries, and the EU.

At the symposium, Natalia Manola (PC) moderated a panel discussion on Open Science policy in Greece, focusing on national strategies, institutional roles, and the need for a self-sustaining Open Science network. The session gathered key stakeholders to explore policy advancements and actionable steps toward strengthening Open Science across the country.

Meanwhile, Elli Papadopoulou (DC) led discussions on HOSI’s Policy Working Group, presenting efforts to revise the National Open Science Plan. Her session focused on research assessment policies, highlighting necessary reforms to enhance the evaluation of Open Science practices in Greek research institutions.

Discover More!

Learn how OSTrails is driving Open Science in Greece by exploring National Pilot Interview Greece. For insights into the 3rd HOSI Symposium and its impact on Open Science policy, read  Building Open Science Together: HOSI Driving Policy Adoption in Greece.