Read the Inteview with the Social Sciences & Humanities 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 Michael Kurzmeier from Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH).

- Michael Kurzmeier

"Curation is an ongoing effort in the SSH Open Marketplace. Being able to exchange data with other SKGs through a common interoperability framework, will help keep records up to date and make it easier for users to bring their research outputs into the Marketplace."

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

The creation of the SSH Open Marketplace was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC) project, which aimed to integrate and consolidate thematic e-infrastructure platforms in preparation for connecting them to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The overall objective of the SSHOC project was to establish the Social Sciences and Humanities segment of EOSC.

As a domain-specific discovery portal and the aggregator of the SSHOC project, the SSH Open Marketplace directly contributes to EOSC by supplementing existing services like the EOSC Resource Hub. It facilitates the seamless exchange of tools, services, data, and knowledge within the research community.

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

One of our ongoing tasks in the SSH Open Marketplace is integrating new data sources. Given the differences in how data is handled by each source, we often need to map the source data model to our own. Additionally, when different vocabularies are used, we must address compatibility issues.

With OSTrails introducing a common Scientific Knowledge Graph (SKG) interoperability format, we anticipate a significant reduction in the need for custom ingest pipelines. This commonality will streamline the integration process and allow us to enrich existing entries by querying other SKGs for missing information.

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

The SSH Open Marketplace is a community-driven discovery portal where researchers can create metadata entries for tools, services, training materials, data sources, publications, and workflows. The workflows enable the detailed description of research processes, linking tools, data sources, training materials, and publications to create a comprehensive view of the research journey.

Items can have relationships with one another, enabling users to discover unexpected connections between resources and fostering opportunities for serendipitous insights. These relationships contribute to a richer and more interconnected research environment, ultimately enhancing the visibility and accessibility of various tools, services, and data.

Curation is a collaborative effort managed by the editorial board and the curation task force. The editorial board oversees the overall strategy and ensures content quality, while the curation task force actively curates new entries, maintains metadata accuracy, and ensures that the resources in the marketplace are up-to-date and relevant to the community.

Because the SSH Open Marketplace brings together diverse resources from the SSH domain and offers a public API endpoint, it is used to track research outputs and act as a single source of truth for various projects such as Text+ who use the Marketplace AP for provision and maintenance of services.

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

The Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage (ACDH-CH) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) hosts and maintains the service. Matej Ďurčo coordinates efforts from the ACDH-CH team, with Stefan Probst acting as the front-end developer, and Dalibor Pančić handling Marketplace deployment. The Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Center (PSNC), affiliated with the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences, provides the data ingestion pipeline and maintains the service. Tomasz Parkoła is responsible for maintaining the back-end code, while Aleksandra Nowak serves as the lead developer of the DACE ingestion pipeline. The curation team includes Klaus Illmayer (OeAW), Alex König (Clarin), Cesare Concordia (ISTI-CNR), Laure Barbot (DARIAH) and Michael Kurzmeier. Regarding the adoption of OSTrails' results, we will integrate the interoperability framework into our processes. Ideally, this will allow us to easily connect to new sources and help users autofill most of the fields when creating a new entry.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

Currently, we are focused on expanding our data sources and refining our integration processes. Our next steps include aligning our infrastructure with the SKG interoperability standards introduced by OSTrails, which will help us to facilitate smoother data ingestion and improved metadata enrichment for our users. 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.

Open Science Days, the national biannual conference organized by the University of Belgrade since 2016, showcases the latest developments and projects in Open Science across Serbia and the Western Balkans. This fifth edition featured over ten initiatives supported largely by EU-funded projects, highlighting contributions from researchers, university professors, and librarians to advancing Open Science practices and infrastructure.

Among the presentations, Obrad Vučkovac, a librarian from the University of Belgrade’s Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, introduced the OSTrails project and the forthcoming Serbian national pilot. His talk outlined the project's goals, with full pilot results to be presented at the next Open Science Days in 2026.

Another presentation on OSTrails and the Serbian national pilot was held at the BEAMING Open Science Clustering event at the University of Novi Sad. The BEAMING project, a Horizon Europe initiative under the WIDERA programme, fosters innovation and bioeconomy through cooperation between higher education institutions, focusing on widening countries in Central-Eastern Europe, South-Eastern Europe, and the Western Balkans, thereby boosting Open Science practices and enhancing the visibility of Serbian scientific work within international frameworks.

Read the National Pilot Interview from Ireland 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 Lindsay Dowling, Open Research Support Unit Lead at Technological University Dublin.

 - Lindsay Dowling

TU Dublin will benefit greatly from leading the Irish National Pilot for OSTrails, providing us with an opportunity to engage with both our local Irish technological universities as project partners, and our international colleagues, to jointly implement truly interoperable systems for future development of the sector.

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

Technological University Dublin (TU Dublin) is Ireland’s first technological university, established under the Technological Universities Act of 2018. It is one of five new universities created as part of this initiative, all of which are collaborating as part of the national pilot for OSTrails.

These new institutions are working together across various networks, formal and informal, to develop shared approaches to research and research infrastructure development, such as the implementation of Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and Data Management Planning Platform Argos. 

As new institutions, we are in a good position to ensure our systems are truly interoperable, aligning with EOSC and OpenAIRE  frameworks. We are also actively involved in the development of Ireland’s national EOSC node, envisaged to run through our mandated member, but overseen by our national EOSC Association and Stakeholder Group, of which TU Dublin is an active member.

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

What excites us most about OSTrails is the chance to collaborate withthe international colleagues, drawing on their insights and expertise to broaden our perspectives. We are particularly looking forward to the opportunity to implement and test system(s) in real-world scenarios, gaining invaluable experience that will shape our approach to future planning and system development at our institutions. 

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

At present there is no unified national strategy for planning, tracking, and assessing research in our country. These processes are typically managed at the institutional or funder level. Our pilot will be one of the first to look at a multi-institutional approach, aiming to inform the development of a national strategy. This effort serves as both a proof of concept for a joint approach and a demonstration of best practice for technological implementations across the research sector.

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

TU Dublin is leading the national pilot in collaboration with Ireland’s four other technological universities: South East Technological University, Munster Technological University, Atlantic Technological University and Technological University of the Shannon. The project team consists of members from each institution from the Library & Research Offices. 

Priorities include the implementation of Argos across our institutions as part of a suite of interoperable services designed to plan, track, and assess research activities. We see this part of the project as the building blocks for:

• A Proof of Concept for a shared national approach to research planning, tracking, and assessment. 

• Emphasizing data quality as a critical requirement for research infrastructure and its interoperability.

Further we see the ability to assess digital objects beyond ‘just’ data for FAIR compliance as being key to realising our shared Open Research ambitions and we envisage the implementation of a recognised FAIR assessment tool - or suite thereof - as a core service at a local level, as an outcome of this project.

As emerging institutions with rapidly growing research outputs, we need systems that automated and standardized tracking and assessment of our research. At the same time, these systems must ensure flexibility and interoperability, allowing us to adapt and remain cost-efficient.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps? 

We are currently working closely with the OpenAire office (thanks Elli!) on developing and refining our Argos instance. Current efforts focus on creating local templates, drafting comprehensive support documentation, and testing import/export functionalities to ensure seamless operation. We aim to have our test instance ready by Q3 of 2025 to begin researcher testing and training across our institutions. 

Beyond the technical implementation, we are working on joint documentation and positions for utilization of the system to ensure as much synergy and shared approach as possible, while still accommodating the unique requirements and context of individual organizations. This dual focus ensures a robust and adaptable foundation for the pilot’s success.

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