Explore the National Pilot Interview from France to discover the latest updates on the OSTrails pilot studies. Dive into their national activities and learn about their progress in integrating open science with research assessment. This month, we had the pleasure of speaking with Laurent Romary and Maud Medves from Inria.

- Laurent Romary (Inria, Scientific Information and Culture)	- Maud Medves (Inria, Scientific Information and Culture Direction, Scientific Information Department)

"Integrating standardised software references in machine-actionable DMPs is an important way of signalling how important software is for the creation, transformation or visualisation of research data. Beyond digital science, we aim at generalising such practice to all scholarly fields."

-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How does it contribute to EOSC? 

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology and gathers over 220 research teams in various scientific fields ranging from digital health to high performance computing. It focuses on research activities in digital science but also leads open science activities (e.g., having pioneered OS software infrastructure by co-founding Software Heritage , taking part in national initiatives on open science in France, development of the French OS monitor). 

Inria is the EOSC mandated organisation for France and is involved in several EOSC projects such as FAIRCORE4EOSC, FAIR-IMPACT and GraspOS. 

As the mandated organisation, Inria takes an active part within the French network of EOSC members, under the auspices of the French Ministry for Higher Education of Research, with the aim of bringing forward, as part of the French contribution to EOSC, the various national infrastructures available in the domains of publication, data and software. 

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

OSTrails is an exciting opportunity for us to improve the way we handle DMP as a component of the research data life cycle. Writing a DMP is often perceived as an administrative burden by project investigators. We do hope that introducing machine-actionable DMPs which can be, to some extent, the basis for further documentations associated with research digital objects (e.g. when deposited in open archives), will be a huge step forward for researchers and their institutions.  

We also look forward to including in maDMPs the description of source code or software that helped creating or handling the corresponding datasets. This is very important in our community, in which software is a central research output. We also hope that it will be an incentive for researchers to better describe their source code and software in open archives, rather than just store them in a git repository. In this respect, Software Heritage, with its systematic archiving of all open-source software code and association of persistent intrinsic identifiers (aka SWHId), provides a solid background for making such references in maDMPs.  

The project will also help us define an institutional policy at Inria concerning research data management at large. 

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

Planning: research planning is mainly addressed at Inria through the support to researchers in writing Data Management Plans (DMP). In France the widely used DMP writing tool is DMP Opidor, which is used by most universities and research performing organisations. Inria is no exception. This online tool allows each institution to customize institutional recommendations for their researchers; support staff can also have access to DMPs drafted by their researchers and provide assistance in enhancing them. 

Tracking: France has the chance of having a unique national publication repository (HAL) available to all institutions for recording their research outputs. Inria has developed a specific policy with a publication mandate in HAL which we are planning to extend to make sure we connect publications with datasets and software. At national level we also track our open science performance in the context of the French Open Science Monitor.  

Assessing: at Inria, the RDM unit staff manually reviews DMPs on request before submission to funders. Funders, whether national (ANR) or European (European Commission), usually perform simple checks of DMPs. At Inria, the Evaluation Committee (the body responsible for assessing the level of excellence of the research conducted at the institute and guaranteeing the level of its recruitment and internal promotions) takes into account work related to software development when conducting annual assessment campaigns. As such Inria policy is fully in based with the direction taken by COARA at international level. 

-What is your pilot about? Can you provide some details on the main actors, services and priorities? How will the results of OSTrails be adopted by your pilot? 

Inria is the unique actor of the French pilot. Though we are focussing on a very specific aspect (source code and software), we will be working closely with partners involved in the French ecosystem of Recherche Data Gouv (our national data repository). Partners of the RDM geographical clusters (Ateliers de la Donnée) as well as the Opidor resource center (Centre de ressources outils communs aux ateliers) will be regularly updated on the project’s progress so that we can integrate OS Trails outputs in the French national tool DMP Opidor.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps?   

We are currently focussing on ensuring the coherence between activities conducted on machine-actionable DMPs and international standards used to describe software, so that a software component can be introduced smoothly in maDMPs. Such references to software within a maDMP should be expressed in a way compatible with the international software description standard CodeMeta, so that one can directly point to the corresponding entry in Software Heritage.

Thank you both!

OSTrails going global

The last edition of the RDA Plenary Meeting that took place in Costa Rica, found many OSTrails partners in the rainy paths of San Jose while others enjoyed the event online using the Whova app. OSTrails was represented by Elli Papadopoulou (ARC), Marek Suchánek (CVUT), Tomasz Miksa (TUWien), Anca Hienola (FMI), Susanna-Assunta Sansone (UOXF), Wim Hugo (Dans/Knaw), Daan Broeder (CLARIN), Tassos Stavropoulos (OpenAIRE).

OSTrails Partners Onsite at RDA Plenary.

In both cases, participation was active in different sessions to communicate the project’s approaches to advancing FAIR principles and interoperability with a focus on enhancing Data Management Plans (DMPs), integrating Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), and fostering a FAIR Digital Object ecosystem. These included topics like ensuring the quality and sustainability of data management, gamifying RDM practices, leveraging tools for curation, and advancing global recommendations for research commons. Specifically, for the latter the dedicated session on DMPs emphasised OSTrails’ commitment to collaborating and aligning practices globally by establishing a common maDMP API and refining interoperability frameworks.

Towards a common API for maDMPs

Co-chairs of the Active DMPs and DMP Common Standards groups—Elli Papadopoulou (DC), Tomasz Miksa (TM), and Marek Suchánek (WPL)—led the session “Active Data Management Plans: What are the actions that we need to realize them?”. Rooted in the Salzburg Manifesto, the agenda was centred on forming new working groups to address API actions and DMP extensions, aligning efforts with initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and DataCite's DMP_IDs. It presented a draft Case Statement, solicited feedback to create a 12–18-month workplan, and encouraged community engagement to refine objectives and establish a comprehensive roadmap for maDMP adoption and interoperability. The session served as a platform to present preliminary results from the OSTrails project, including the Plan-Track-Assess Pathways and interoperability frameworks outlined in early project deliverables (D1.1: Plan-Track-Assess Pathways, M4_Interim Products Establishment for Cross-Task Collaboration).

OSTrailers were joined by other RDA community contributors who shared their views and activities towards advancing maDMPs in their regions. Becky Grady from the University of California highlighted enhancements in the DMP Tool that is widely used in the US, including ongoing developments to make it fully machine-actionable and integrate API-based functionalities. Elli Papadopoulou from ARC presented the European perspective reflected in the OSTrails PTA framework, emphasising planning, tracking, and assessing data management aligned with FAIR principles. Marek Suchánek from CVUT addressed maintenance efforts for the RDA DMP Common Standard, while Tomasz Miksa from TUWien introduced the idea for a new working group that is centred around a standardised API, aimed at increasing technical interoperability of maDMPs.

OSTrails PTA Framework.
Community discussions - Takeaways

Interactive discussions explored the different applications of maDMPs across different settings e.g. research infrastructure vs funding-oriented, including their adoption in tracking research outputs and aligning with evolving metadata standards. Participants stressed the importance of fostering interoperability among Research Data Management (RDM) tools and services, addressing challenges like balancing technical complexity with usability. The session concluded with concrete next steps, such as submitting a proposal for the new working group, finalising updates to the DMP Common Standard, and encouraging broader community engagement through shared resources and pilots.

Learn more:

• Presentation slides

• RDA DMP Common Standards GitHub

• DMP Common Standards WG

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.