Nowadays, data fuels discovery, innovation, and decision-making; therefore, the ability to manage and curate data responsibly is crucial.
The Master in Data Management and Curation (MDMC) is a pioneering educational program that embraces the “FAIR-by-design” paradigm, going beyond theory to train professionals in the practical implementation of FAIR principles across the entire research data lifecycle. Rather than retrofitting datasets to meet FAIR criteria, MDMC students learn to embed Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability from the earliest stages of data planning, within the wider context of Open Science.
This forward-thinking approach is made possible through a well-established collaboration between Area Science Park and SISSA and benefits from its dynamic research and innovation ecosystem. Designed for a new generation of data professionals, MDMC fosters a strategic understanding of the research process, combined with a unique mix of technical, ethical, and communication skills essential for real-world FAIR implementation.
The training structure consists of eight intensive weeks of in-person lectures and hands-on exercises, followed by a six-month internship in cutting-edge research laboratories or data-intensive institutions, during which students implement FAIR-by-design workflows and pipelines in real scientific contexts. This model offers a rare opportunity to work closely with researchers, develop tailored data strategies, and engage with the practical challenges of semantic interoperability, metadata standards, and sustainable infrastructure.
By shaping versatile and practice-oriented data professionals, MDMC contributes to building a new generation of researchers who can transform data from a research byproduct into a powerful strategic asset—crucial for both academic excellence and data-driven innovation.

From Principles to Practice: Putting Responsible Research Assessment into Action.

The question is no longer why we need to reform research assessment, but how. This hands-on workshop introduces the Open Infrastructure Checklist, a practical tool developed by the CoARA WG on Open Infrastructures for RRA. Together, we will test its application on real-world services like OpenAIRE’s Researcher Profile, GraspOS Horizon Europe Project, and IOI’s Infra Finder. Join us to co-evaluate, co-create, and shape the future of research assessment, open, ethical, and built to last.

Open and Commercial: Rethinking Partnerships for Sustainable Open Infrastructure

Can openness and commercial collaboration truly coexist? This panel brings together voices from across sectors to tackle tough questions about trust, funding, and sustainability. Join us for a candid discussion on building equitable, transparent partnerships that support resilient open infrastructure, without compromising core values.

As Open Science accelerates, licensing models must evolve. Join us for a hands-on workshop to explore OpenREL, a new rights expression toolkit developed in Horizon Europe EOSC Beyond project. Learn how to represent complex access and reuse conditions in machine-readable form, from GDPR compliance to dual licensing and ethical constraints. Work through real-life cases with peers, shape the future of rights governance, and help build a FAIRer, trusted Open Science ecosystem.

International Relations are established for various purposes; however, the nature of this Open Science Fair 2025 “Fusing Forces – Accelerating Open Science through Collaboration” invites us to address the relationships that exist around Cooperation, specifically new trends.
To this end, we will review briefly what has characterized these ties for years, and then we will suggest an alternative in detail, illustrated with a successful example that is currently in operation.
Traditionally, International Relations are defined as diplomacy, understood as the relationship established by nations or nation-states as a whole, such as a federal or central government, whether bilateral, one-on-one, or multilateral, between more than two countries. However, starting in the 1980s, a series of non-traditional manifestations of what has come to be known as paradiplomacy began to emerge. New actors with common expectations belonging to different systems and degree of decentralization have been working cooperatively without the intervention of central governments. Our example involves two different organizations: a Mexican research center and OpenAIRE, as subnational and supranational actors respectively.

A comparative table will show how the most representative features of paradiplomacy and its application in the creation of North American Studies (NAS). NAS is an ongoing collaborative project that transcends borders and contributes to strengthening one of the Open Science infrastructures, within the framework of the Open Science UNESCO recommendation and the FAIR principles. Scientific paradiplomacy is imperative in times of uncertainty and paradigm shift in international relations.

The presentation explores open science policy development in Finland in the context of stakeholder engagement and the creation of the first national policy recommendation for citizen science with focus on measuring impact and community engagement.

The presentation is based on two 2025 studies. First study is established on the shift of responsibility for coordinating open science in Finland from the Ministry of Education and Culture to the Finnish research community, specifically the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies (TSV). We examined documents from the TSV citizen science working group, including meeting notes, survey results, and the final policy paper, to understand how stakeholder participation influenced the policy-making process.

The second study examines the impact that the recommendation had on the stakeholders. We examined survey results, and the performance of citizen science indicators based on the recommendation from the national open science and research monitoring results from 2024 to explore the impact of the recommendation.

The results show that involving stakeholders helped shape policy recommendations, especially in improving institutional support, guidelines, and funding visibility for citizen science. However, challenges like uneven awareness and engagement among stakeholders could limit the effectiveness of participatory approaches. By placing these findings within the context of participatory policymaking and stakeholder theory, the presentation provides insights into how inclusive policy design works and how participatory governance and science policy development can be integrated into institutional frameworks to drive change.

The emergence of a digitally enabled Open Science has coincided with the vast growth of high education in the Global South, leading to a vast expansion of research and publishing activity, as attested to, for example, by the 55,000 journals (almost entirely open, without fees for readers or authors) using the journal publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) launched in 2002. The rate and scale of this expansion of research may well lead to a great many missed opportunities in utilizing relevant research findings, vital to the advancement of science, whether through shortfalls in indexing or mistrust of unfamiliar sources. On the principle that we not only to open science but must find ways of supporting researcher and public use of this open science activity, I present an experiment in developing a credible standardized label for each research publication that precisely summarizes its adherence to scholarly publishing standards in ways designed to inform readers about those standards. The resulting “Publication Facts Label,” lists eleven data points, from number of reviewers to days to publication, all securely drawn from the journal publishing platform. Intended for industry-wide use, it is currently being tested with journals using OJS, with this presentation reviewing the label’s design for researchers and public, its integrity and trust features, the implementation plan, as well, as its review by Nature readers, open access publishers, school students, and others, while offering attendees ways of seeing the label in action and, if so inclined, supporting its adoption.