With the rapid expansion of AI and its applications in recent years, a new challenge has emerged: how to sustainably improve the quality of the data on which AI builds its knowledge. One solution is leveraging the benefits of Open Science, with its open infrastructure and repositories, as one of valuable sources of such knowledge. However, as global demand for data to advance AI systems increases, it has led to a rise in bot and crawler activity that overwhelms servers, amplifies system overhead, degrades service quality, and restricts access for legitimate users.

The primary challenge for repositories that follow the principles of Open Science is to find ways to manage crawler-generated traffic in a manner that ensures continued access for legitimate users, upholds ethical standards for information exchange over the Internet, and strives to serve all users without significant delays. Our goal was to identify a solution capable of recognizing damaging crawler patterns and guiding their actions to comply with ethical standards.

The University of Belgrade and its Computer Centre have recently faced a series of challenges due to traffic overload in their repositories, including incidents such as DDoS attacks. These issues compromised the daily operations of repository administrators and researchers who actively contribute to the repositories. Since it affected multiple production instances, the overall infrastructure was endangered. As a result, we developed a new generalized methodology to identify malicious crawlers and guide them to operate within ethical behavior principles.

he ETH Domain – comprising four federal research institutes and two technical universities – supports a Swiss-wide programme for Open Research Data (ORD), with initiatives to improve research data practices across the Confederation. Our project focuses on strengthening researchers’ skills in Research Data Management (RDM), a foundational but often overlooked element of Open Science.

To promote a shared vision and foster FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices, we co-create Open Educational Resources (OER) with the ETH Domain research community. This poster presents the Data Management Campus, an ecosystem of open training materials on RDM practices, designed to strengthen ORD skills across Switzerland.

Key highlights include

Modular, Self-Paced Learning: Hosted on the SwissMOOC platform (based on Open edX), the Data Management Campus offers ten interactive, 30-minute modules covering best practices across the research data lifecycle. These are openly licensed and adaptable for reuse in higher education institutions throughout the Swiss research landscape.

User-Centric Approach: A filterable training portal (open-research-data-portal.ch/training) enables users to browse learning resources by topic, format, and institution – enhancing discoverability for researchers, students, and support staff.

Community-Driven Sharing: The ETH Domain’s Zenodo OER RDM Community supports transparent dissemination, reuse, and collaborative curation of training materials, expanding beyond the e-learning modules. This community targets both researchers and trainers.

We invite OSFair participants to explore this practical model for a nationwide collaboration that builds RDM skills through accessible, modular training, and to gain insights into a community-driven learning ecosystem that leverages open-source platforms and OER.

The European Diamond Capacity Hub (EDCH) is a collective designed to strengthen the Diamond Open Access (OA) community in Europe. It offers open, FAIR-aligned services, tools and best practices through a dedicated online platform, providing targeted support, training, and networking opportunities to Diamond OA community members.

Diamond Discovery Hub (DDH): An authoritative index of Diamond OA journals helping authors, libraries, funders, and research assessment bodies identify trustworthy journals.
Diamond Open Access Standard and self-assessment tools: A quality assurance framework to assess compliance with best practices.
Publishing tools: A set of tools and add-ons to optimise publishing workflows, improve content management, and uphold editorial quality.
Registry and Forum: A registry of Diamond OA publishers, service and tools and technology providers and a forum for collaboration and shared solutions to promote integrity and transparency in scholarly publishing.
Resources & Guidelines: A comprehensive set of materials supporting publishers transitioning to Diamond OA, including best practices and sustainability.
Training Platform: Targeted learning modules that equip editors and publishers with the knowledge to implement best publishing practices and maintain research integrity.

Masters’ and PhD candidates earn their degree by completing a thesis, which typically contains one or more research articles. Yet, along the research path, researchers may create other outputs (e.g., protocols, methods, data, code), use reproducible and transparent practices (e.g., evidence synthesis, reporting guidelines, use of unique identifiers) and engage academics and non-academics to develop, conduct and disseminate (e.g., public engagement) the research. Implementing and sharing these practices and outputs accelerates progress by facilitating reuse, reproducibility and replication. To change research practice and culture, however, we must recognize and reward researchers for sharing more than research articles.

In this implementation-focused opt-in pilot program, we aim to offer University of Coimbra Masters’ and PhD candidates a formal reward for implementing reproducible, reusable and open research practices in their thesis research. We are co-creating the reward criteria with a Local Advisory Board (graduate students, course coordinators, and supervisors), with advice from an expert External Board.

The criteria include: (a) list of practices (e.g., reporting of null results, author contributions statements) and outputs (e.g., reusable step-by-step protocols, materials) from which the students can select, (b) assessment criteria for each practice/output (focus on quality), and (c) number of practices/outputs that must be implemented. The criteria are designed to be adaptable to different disciplines and projects.

The program will open in mid-2025. We will monitor participation, attrition, and effectiveness for program improvement. An implementation guide with lessons learned will be shared promoting mutual learning with other institutions aiming to implement similar measures.

This poster summarizes the goal and methodology of the Transparency to Sustain Open Science infrastructure (TSOSI) project. Launched in September 2024, TSOSI aims to strengthen the sustainability of open science infrastructure. How? By highlighting the governments, institutions, library consortia and other organizations that have financially supported open science infrastructure. TSOSI’s guiding principle is: “The more we highlight those who have funded, the more funders we will attract”.
Open science infrastructures typically do not rely on selling services; instead they support research as a common good. These infrastructures can reach sustainability only if research stakeholders contribute financially to their budgets. However, we find that only a few research stakeholders do so. For instance, the publishing platform SciPost has reported that just 135 institutions have financially contributed, despite 12,000 institutions benefiting from its services. The goal of TSOSI is to increase the number of funders and retain them.
TSOSI takes a data-driven approach: it collects data on funding and enriches it with persistent identifiers. Its main output is a web platform that enables users to explore who has funded what. By displaying this data, we aim to facilitate the decision making process to fund these infrastructures.
The project is led led by the Université Grenoble Alpes and funded by the French Committee for open science of the French Ministry of Research. The partners of the project are DOAB, DOAJ, SCOSS SciPost, PeerCommunityIn, OPERAS, and Couperin.