Open Science Infrastructures: The Case of Austrian RDM Policies
- 2025-09-17 10:45
- 10:45
- Room: 81/R-003A - Science Gateway Auditorium A
- Speaker:
- Celine Wawruschka, , Celine Wawruschka is an Open Science policy advisor at Austrian Universities (uniko) and is in charge of the stakeholder platform Open Science Austria (OSA). In the field of open science, she previously set up the open access journal ‘Medieval Worlds’ at the Institute for Medieval Studies of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and was editor-in-chief for several years. Furthermore, she was responsible for the project development and project coordination of Citizen Science at the Vienna Adult Education Centres and in this context developed and managed the project ‘Climate-friendly everyday practices: a participatory science communication project for adolescents and young adults with migrant background’. , Open Science Austria (OSA), https://www.osa-openscienceaustria.at/en/
The initiative of the European Research Area (ERA) aims at creating a unified research and innovation space across Europe. One of the key objectives of ERA is to promote open access to research results and data, thus encouraging transparency, reproducibility, and wider dissemination of knowledge. In order to achieve an alignment with this ERA objective (and others), the European Research Area National Action Plan (ERA-NAP) supports the individual EU member states to contribute to a European Open Science infrastructure.
In this way, national measures for an open science infrastructure are promoted, which ultimately aim to create an open science infrastructure within a European framework. Open Science policies are the means of choice for the creation of such a structure at national level – because only they guarantee the joint endeavour to bundle the interests and needs of all stakeholders.
In my presentation, I outline the goals and challenges of working on such a national Open Science policy using the example of research data management in the Austrian Higher Education Area, which a working group of the Austrian University Conference has addressed, in line with the ERA-NAP. How do different types of universities define research data? What restrictions regarding openness do they wish to reserve for themselves - and for what reasons? Up to what point can a framework policy form a common ground – and at what point should individual standards be applied?