It was back in 2018 when OpenAIRE supported the creation of the Open Schools Journal for Open Science for students through the OpenAIRE-Advance H2020 project. The idea flurished and students all over Europe submitted articles on their findings covering a variety of topics and produce many publications available online. Importantly, it's not only about showing one's (students) findings, but also to understand and follow important Open Science principles (i.e. FAIR data), learn to collaborate with co-students and teachers, or put into one sentence; simulate the research lifecycle through the lenses of Open Science to students.

The Open Schools Journal for Open Science (OSJ) is the first European journal designed to fulfill the specifications of a regular journal while designed for and written by students. Therefore, it encourages students from Primary and Secondary schools across Europe under the mentoring of their teachers to publish knowledge, experiences, data, and research outcomes produced by their school project. The focus is on Science, Engineering and Technology domain.

The OSJ lifecycle

OSJ simulates the research lifecycle to the school environment, starting from a problem realization, definition, research, and analysis of information. Data collection from valid and open sources is also experienced. Students learn to build arguments on a suggested solution or explanation of their findings. As a next step, students are introduced into the metadata definition of the components of their article such as “Title”, “Authors”, “Affiliation”, “Subject”, “Domain”, “Date”, “Language”, “License”, “Language”, and “DOI”. Through this process, students are introduced to the concept of Open Science, data, and the value of digital identities, develop critical thinking skills, and learn more about the importance of supporting their opinion. The final step of article review, acceptance by scientists and school professors closes the research cycle and opens up curiosity for future findings.

Takeaways

The important takeaways of the OSJ initiative are:

• The simulation of research work and process through the research lifecycle to school students
• The insertion of scientific methods, guidelines, and principles to schools
• The openness of Open Science and available e-infrastructures like OpenAIRE and variety of services vertically to student ecosystem
• The evolution of the school ecosystem towards the new norms of Open Science (see the graph below)

Since its launch in 2018, OSJ has published 13 issues presenting 240 student’s scientific articles and has more than 260 actives users. The future is bright and promising for OSJ as the future projections of number of publications shows.

Where to find the OSJ articles

Articles are published on a regular basis. They are open access, and available online on a dedicated community on Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/openschoolsjournal/?page=1&size=20 and on the publishers’ website: https://ejournals.epublishing.ekt.gr/index.php/openschoolsjournal/index