Researchers from all fields, their employers (universities and research institutes), policy makers and funders

Training and skills for open science
Skills within the wider research context

Early Career Researchers Open science skills Transferable skills

As the employment landscape for Early-Career Researchers (ECRs) is becoming increasingly intersectoral, international, and interdisciplinary, it is important that doctoral programs include training in soft and hard skills that are not only fundamental for research, but are also transferable to other careers. These transferable skills can increase ECRs’ employability, allowing them to pursue different career paths and broaden their options in the academic, governmental, and private sectors. Among others, transferable skills related to Open Science are becoming increasingly important, and they can be acquired with doctoral training. However, as the EOSC Executive Board Skills and Training Group pointed out, several issues still exist. These include a lack of Open Science expertise (particularly in relation to Open Data), varying levels of digital literacy, inadequate media and communication skills, and a lack of centralization of learning and training resources. On the other hand, measuring researchers’ skills and competences is a key first step for the European Commission towards addressing the precarity of ERCs and reducing brain drain. We have reviewed the curricula of two course providers in Open Science, FOSTER and the Open Science MOOC, and have identified a list of transferable skills, classifying them on the basis of learning outcome. Through this classification, we have found that a diverse array of transferable skills are crucial to Open Science education. We foresee a key role of Open Science training and its derived skills in empowering researchers for their career development and assessment.

policymakers, research funders, research performing organisations, academic libraries, research infrastructures

Sharing best practices and knowledge, Skills within the wider research context, Sustaining open science training: people, resources, governance

open science, research data, research data management, scholarly communication, training

Last year, the proposal for a National Open Science Plan in Greece was published outlining the steps that the national stakeholders in Research & Innovation should make. The two OpenAIRE members, “Athena” Research Center (NOAD) and the consortium of academic libraries “HEAL-Link”, have a long standing cooperation in the country. They support each other's work by building the bridges between academia and research, and laying the foundations for the sustainable implementation of Open Science in Greece. In particular, they exchange knowledge and practices on:
- (co-)developing data services that follow best practices to enable FAIRness of data and EOSC compatibility, such as through the Hellenic Data Service “HELIX” and the University data repositories “HARDMIN”.
- promoting skills on Open Science and Research Data Management (RDM) to incubate competencies of researchers as well as to contribute to upskilling and reskilling of the research support workforce.
- providing apt guidance and support in EU framework programme requests, including the COVID-19 calls, via the OpenAIRE helpdesk and the material in Greek language of the Scholarly Communication Unit of HEAL-Link.

Moreover, “Athena” and HEAL-Link both perform activities to draw the bigger picture, in support of informed decision and policy making. For example, the monitoring reports by SCU/HEAL-Link are giving the community the insights to understand the progress of OA publishing in the country. Similarly, the OpenAIRE NOAD collaborates with others and initiates actions that assist in understanding the current challenges and opportunities in R&I, including the EOSC and the COVID-19 crisis.

The lighting talk will provide a detailed update on the actions that the two organisations have taken to promote Open Science in Greece.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and research communities, repository managers, libraries, research administrators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sharing best practices and knowledge, Responsible metrics and research assessment

European Universities, responsible assessment, transformation of higher education, Open Science, incentives & rewards, European Research Area

Policy initiatives such as the European Research Area and infrastructures such as the European Open Science Cloud include calls for a reform of research assessment, recognition, and reward systems to more strongly reflect Open Science criteria. However, while several frontrunners at national and institutional level are emerging, many universities are reluctant to reform, citing systemic obstacles to changing research assessment.

A potential answer to this collective action problem are the alliances funded by the European University Initiative, which are expected to introduce “academic career systems that support and reward researchers who participate in engaging with society and in a culture of sharing the results of their research, in particular by ensuring early sharing and open access to their publications and other research outputs”.

The EUTOPIA European University – consisting of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (BE); University of Warwick (UK), University of Ljubljana (SI); Cergy Paris Universite (FR); University Pompeu Fabra (ES); University of Gothenburg (SE) – is implementing a process to reform research assessment based on the INORMS SCOPE Framework for Research Evaluation. Through deliberation about the purpose and methods employed for research assessment, the alliance will develop an overarching framework for research assessment and draft individual commitments to update the individual assessment systems.

The lightning talk will present this change process and the intended impact. The talk seeks to stimulate exchange of experience and collective action across research institutions, universities, university networks and alliances, to accelerate the ‘practical turn’ of research assessment reform and align incentive and reward systems towards Open Science practices.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and research communities, repository managers, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, service providers and innovators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and FAIR data

RDM best practice, open community development, life-science data

In this lightning talk we will cover the following on RDMkit.

• How RDMkit organises its best practice guidance. Components of RDMkit and entry points.
• The RDMkit approach to achieve FAIR data.
• The RDMkit community and editorial process.
• How RDMkit is integrated into other platforms channeling RDM expertise.

Proper management of research data is increasing its presence in the lifecycle of data-driven investigations. On the one hand, funders or host institutions demand research data management (RDM) by requiring researchers to build and implement data management plans for projects. On the other hand, research infrastructures provide a plethora of RDM support in the form of tools, policies, standards and guidelines. Researchers often find themselves lost in the middle, overwhelmed in their task to take advantage of the available support and to meet the funder demands for RDM.

ELIXIR is a distributed European infrastructure for life-science data. ELIXIR's 23 national nodes have observed recurring RDM challenges for life-science data and the major pitfalls that researchers find themselves in. To address these RDM experts in ELIXIR have combined forces to build RDMkit (https://rdmkit.elixir-europe.org), launched in March 2021. For researchers, RDMkit is a one stop shop of information, advice and signposting to research data management know-how, tools, examples and best practice, written by life scientists for life scientists. For data managers, RDMkit is a resource to complement institutional guidelines. For funding agencies and policy makers, RDMkit is a resource that can be included in guidelines. RDMkit is recommended in the European Commission's Horizon Europe Program Guide as the "resource for Data Management guidelines and good practices for the Life Sciences." The RDMkit is an open community with editorially guided content from over 95 contributors.

In this lightning talk we will present how RDMkit organises its guidance, the distinctive aspects that it takes in making life-science data Findable Access Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) and how RDMkit is integrated into other tools and platforms channeling RDM expertise in registries such as FAIRsharing, bio.tools and the TeSS Training portal, and working with ELIXIR's Data Stewardship Wizard decision support tool.

Libraries, publishers, policymakers, research communities, funders, researchers

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sharing best practices and knowledge

Open Access, OA books, Networks, Best practice exchange, Community-driven, community-learning

The Open Access Books Network (OABN) is a relatively new kid on the block, but it punches above its weight. It launched in September 2020, as a bottom-up initiative focused on OA books, coordinated by representatives of DOAB/OAPEN, SPARC Europe, and ScholarLed. In its first year, the OABN has brought together the OA books community to stage numerous events, share best practices, and discuss new developments and initiatives with an emphasis on OA books. This lightning talk will explore our experiences developing the OABN, our early growth, and the lessons we have learned along the way.

Our most significant series of community events so far began in March 2021: over the span of three months, we ran a series of workshops, Voices from the OA Books Community, devoted to exploring different aspects of policy for OA books, to gather wide-ranging feedback from the community that could inform the forthcoming Plan S guidance for books. The series gathered around 450 different stakeholders, including publishers, funders, OA policy makers, researchers, librarians, and infrastructure providers from all over the world. This series demonstrated that the OABN can be a valuable vehicle in facilitating knowledge exchange in the relatively niche field of OA books. 

Now that we are celebrating OABN’s first birthday, we want to look back at lessons learnt from the past twelve months. How does one build a strong network, uniting such diverse stakeholders as publishers, librarians, service providers, policymakers and funders? How do we engage and encourage community members to interact with the OABN? How does it help them and what questions do they have? This lightning talk will provide a snapshot of the first year of the OABN, answering some of the aforementioned questions and with an emphasis on the community-oriented ‘Voices from the OA Books Community’ series.

Policy makers and funders, Arts and Humanities researchers and research communities, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods
Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities
Value added data products/services from open science
Training and skills for open science
European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and FAIR data

Open Humanities, Responsible career assessment, Open access to monographs, FAIR data, FAIR Cultural Heritage data

The digital transformation of research opened up radically new potentials in innovation and dissemination in all scientific areas. Open Science is becoming the new normal modus operandi in them, also as increasingly central conditions of research funding. Still, in many cases, the dominant impact of STEM disciplines on the Open Science paradigm makes it uneasy for Arts and Humanities scholars to translate these values to their everyday research realities. Therefore, it is crucially important to establish a dedicated discourse and community practices around the open research culture as it makes sense in the Arts and Humanities disciplines. DARIAH is in a unique position to push forward to an open ecosystem that is organically growing out from real community practices and needs.

The presentation aims to outline discipline-specific, yet widely interoperable models of Open Science emerging from community practices of arts and humanities. It will be shown how DARIAH, a pan-European infrastructure for arts and humanities builds an open agenda for arts and humanities research that is firmly grounded in disciplinary realities. This includes:

• Providing a strong voice for arts and humanities research communities to be heard in European and national research policy debates, with special focus on career assessment
• Supporting our communities in navigating themselves in this whole new world and providing Open Science advocacy to them in all career stages and levels of expertise.
• Making arts and humanities’ contributions to Open Scholarship more visible both inside and outside the arts and humanities research communities.
• Facilitating access to Cultural Heritage data
• Building infrastructural components that enable open research practices across arts and humanities disciplines. 

Policy makers and funders, research communities, libraries, research support services, research-performing organisations, EOSC

Competence centers: models, integration and coordination, Sharing best practices and knowledge, Skills within the wider research context, Sustaining open science training: people, resources, governance

Data stewardship in Austria, postgraduate certificate data steward, data stewardship training, open science training

Data-driven research is growing exponentially. In order to support researchers with the proper management of their data, 500.000 data stewards will need to be trained in the EU alone. The first professional data stewards in Austria (e.g., at the TU Graz) had to acquire their skills and knowledge while “learning on the job”. As there is currently no dedicated training for data stewards in Austria, the Vienna University Library in cooperation with the FAIR Data Austria project currently develops the first postgraduate certificate for data stewards.

With regard to the tasks of data stewards (especially the support of researchers, information transfer and research data management (RDM) training, as well as requirements engineering), the course will include the basics of RDM, open science, data science, coding and teaching skills. The course will be practice-oriented and allow the students to learn not only from national and international experts on data stewardship and RDM but also benefit from transdisciplinary exchange among the participants themselves. The course will be offered part-time and in a hybrid format as a way for RPOs to upskill current research support staff as well as offer an alternative career path for researchers. Data Stewardship experts on the national and international level have given feedback on the preliminary curriculum in three workshop in July 2021.

Research institutions worldwide are developing data stewardship training to meet the growing demand. As the first formalized further education program in Austria, this lightning talk on the postgraduate certificate “Data Steward” from the Vienna University Library is sure to spark discussion on the topic of data stewardship training and contribute to the global efforts regarding Open Science education. The talk should serve as an example of possible collaborative efforts to implement high-quality certified data stewardship training on the national level.

Policy makers and funders, researchers, research Infrastructures and research communities, repository managers, publishers and content providers, libraries, research administrators, service providers and innovators, EOSC

Interdisciplinary collaborations: Networks, services, methods Sustaining Open infrastructures, services and tools for research communities European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and FAIR data

Overlay journals ; Open repositories ; Interoperability ; OA Diamond journals

Episciences is a platform to publish diamond open access overlay journals.

It offers an alternative to the monolithic system of scientific publication dominated by private publishers. The ambition is to provide the scientific communities with the technical means to produce high quality journals, at an efficient cost, compliant by design with FAIR principles, by relying on open archives and repositories in general (arXiv ; Zenodo ; HAL ; CWI). The mechanism implemented is simple: the submission of an article to a journal is done by a prior deposit in an open archive. The article is freely accessible and therefore consultable by all, whether or not it is accepted by the journal.

Episciences contributes to the development of bibliodiversity by supporting an alternative path to the conventional model of scientific publication. The editorial process is based on a convergence of the stages of qualification, certification and dissemination and a system for recording the different versions of a document (the preprint reviewed, revised, accepted for publication, the new version, the published article are all "record of version"). Thus the value chain is no longer limited to the only reference version which is the published article ("version of record").

The platform is currently being integrated in the OpenAIRE service catalogue and the EOSC portal thanks to the OpenAIRE Nexus project.

Episciences is tightly coupled with open repositories and will soon leverage the COAR Notify project to enhance overlay journals’s interoperability with open repositories. Based on recommendations of Notify Project, the journals will be able to exchange notifications with open repositories. For instance authors will be able to submit their preprint to a journal right after their submission on a preprint server ; the preprint servers will be able to be notified when a preprint has been endorsed and published by a journal.

Academic authors; infrastructure and research communities; publishers and content providers; libraries

Scholarly communication; Open Access monographs; Library subscriptions; Membership models

Collective funding models, Open Science Infrastructure, Sustaining OSis, Sustainability

We present the work of Liverpool University Press and the Central European University Press who have, with assistance from the COPIM Project, launched an innovative revenue model this year to fund open access monographs. Building on existing library subscription models, their membership programmes give libraries access to highly-regarded backlist eBooks, with the membership fees then used to publish new frontlist monographs that will be OA for anyone in the world to read.

As the reality of Covid-19 dawned early in 2020 and campuses worldwide went into lockdown, publishers rushed to temporarily open their publications by removing paywalls. Usage of eBooks soared. It seems clear there is an opportunity to reassess scholarly monograph publishing. Given the current global library environment and budget pressures exacerbated by Covid, a consortial model of funding promises a cost-effective solution for OA that means no single institution bears a disproportionate burden. This model appeals to both those libraries that wish to pay for subscription-access content (i.e. traditional university acquisition models), and those libraries that are in a position to support OA initiatives. It brings many institutions together under one roof for an affordable route to open access books.

We call this transformational scheme Opening the Future and its aim is to make library funds go further: achieving the dual objectives of increasing library digital collections while also supporting open access. As a pilot with COPIM it is a small-scale trial for how small- to medium-sized traditional university presses might convert to a low-risk and sustainable OA model. COPIM is documenting these publisher case studies to create a free toolkit, codebase and roadmap for other presses considering going OA.