FAIRsFAIR and OpenAIRE organised a joint workshop on April 28th aimed to discuss the role of national-level initiatives to advance skills development for research data management. At a European level, the emerging European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) provides impetus for skills development. However, the recent report of the EOSC Working Group on Skills & Training finds that national skills policy is usually fragmented or underdeveloped when concerning skills for research data and data-intensiv...

After being postponed twice, due to Covid-19, the online OpenAIRE Good Practice Exchange (GPE) programme organized by DANS (Data Archiving and Networked Services) took place on 18 January 2021. The goal of the programme is to provide a framework through which OpenAIRE NOADs can share their knowledge and expand their skills in Open Science. And because DANS is a national centre of expertise and repository for research data, the main topics on this day were best practices on Research Data Manageme...

Authors: Gina Pavone and Emma Lazzeri, ISTI-CNR In 2020, the Italian NOAD started a new project on training. The initial idea was to design a set of events to show the way the general and cross-sectoral topic of Open Science was embedded in a particular discipline, delving into aspects and tools specific for a single research area. A first webinar for earth and environmental sciences was held in May: it was a single and introductory webinar on the principles and motivation of Open Science. ...

Background: Towards the end of 2020, CHIST-ERA organized a set of training events for its researchers network in light of their newly adopted Open Science policy. The courses were prepared and run in partnership with OpenAIRE that has been advising CHIST-ERA on Open Access and Research Data Management (RDM) issues to develop and implement policies and services (CHIST-ERA Open Science Advisory Board). CHIST-ERA is a pan european consortium of national funders supporting research on Information an...

The focus: Athena Research Center (ARC) continues the series of informative and educational workshops related to important practices, tools and contact points for COVID-19 research in Greece. In December, a joint workshop on Galaxy, the infrastructure for biological data analysis was organised with the Biomedical Sciences Research Center "Alexander Fleming" and the Institute of Applied Biosciences of the Centre for Research and Technology Hellas. The workshop informed about the Greek Node of the...

Take-aways from the workshop organised by the OpenAIRE Community of Practice of training coordinators    Blogpost by Rene van Horik, Ellen Leenarts (DANS) and Iryna Kuchma (EIFL) The topic of the workshop concerns issues related to the processing of personal data in relation to a training event. GDPR requirements must be properly addressed and personal data must be protected. Obviously a training event cannot be organised without having information on the background of t...

 "Will someone really use my data?" is the question we often hear from researchers, especially in social sciences and humanities – "will someone be able to and will be interested in reusing my data"?  Data sharing advocates need evidence of data reuse, but they are "the last to be told"! For example, we know that Zenodo is heavily used, but rarely do people tell us what for, or include the necessary links to or from their articles/analyses. We decided to look outside Zenodo to see what...

Data can be reused by others, for example, to ask different questions or to enrich them and build further applications or new products. Many Research Funding Organizations are demanding data sharing with the idea that data reuse can foster new research outcomes, innovation and economic opportunities. Open Science strives for transparency, and opening up research data may have many advantages for science, ranging from replicability of experiments to reusability of the data itself. The idea is tha...

This blog post is authored by Robin Rice, Data Librarian and Head, Research Data Support, University of Edinburgh. https://www.linkedin.com/in/robinrice/ Edinburgh DataShare is an institutional research data repository, which serves as the Open Access archiving solution of the University of Edinburgh's Research Data Service. It was established in 2008 as a proof of concept and became a funded part of the broader service in 2012. Based on open source repository platform, ...

During Open Access Week, Open Science staff from Belgian universities teamed up to organize a series of 4 webinars aimed at research support staff to provide information on Open Science skills and offer the opportunity to discuss approaches to Open Science literacy and training. The first webinar 'Skills development for Open Science' introduced two EOSC related talks. Sadia Vancauwenbergh (EOSC, UHasselt) talked about the EOSC – skills and training working group which is working on building comp...

This blog post is authored by S. Venkataraman (DCC) in the framework of the RDM task force's "Data Reuse" working group. Introduction  Not all data can be easily reused, if at all. These usually arise from sources that need to maintain confidentiality based on a number of factors that could lead to the identification of individuals or other sensitive information. In these cases, different measures need to be taken to ensure the protection of identities. Meanwhile, the FAIR princip...

The University Computing Centre of the University of Zagreb SRCE has published a Handbook on research data management entitled "Research data - what to do with it?" that provides instructions on how to manage research data for efficient sharing and reuse in accordance with FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. The handbook is suitable for students, librarians and anyone interested in the topic of research data management, and it is publicly available (in Croatian).&nbs...

Digital change and the rapid developments in the information sector and the area of research data management are creating new challenges and fields of activity. Continuous increase in the amount and complexity of data can be observed - specifically in scientific research fields, research communities as well as research support services at universities and university libraries. Accordingly, there is a clear need for further education and training. In order to meet the new requirements, Data Libra...

The blog post is authored by all participants to the GPE programme: Jiří Marek, Gina Pavone, Ajia Uzula and Obrad Vučkovac  The Göttingen State and University Library (SUB) was founded in 1734, two years before the University of Göttingen. The SUB is one of the first research libraries in Germany and in Europe, pioneering cataloguing systems in the past and, nowadays, intensively working to offer up to date services to students and researchers. The OpenAIRE Good P...

Background: Digital and Open Science skills are key into EOSC's operations and future, and the upskilling of researchers and research support staff is therefore essential for its success. A culture change for sharing research outcomes, policy awareness, and compliance and knowledge of ICT is needed to empower individuals and institutions to develop and maintain EOSC competences science and capabilities. Why are synergies important: Digital skills are needed everywhere, not just in EOSC. In parti...

On the 3rd of July 2020 a new website was released which takes a deep dive into the practicalities of making FAIR research data. The site is conceived as a blended learning resource targeted at researchers in all disciplines and the goal is to show how they can make their own research data more FAIR through real life examples from the Humanities, Social, Natural, and Health Sciences. The site is based on written explanations garnished with video testimonials from 9 different researchers and scie...

June 2020, Ellen Leenarts on behalf of the team How do universities organise their institutional Research Data Management Support? When starting to ponder this task a lot of questions may arise. Is Research Data Management Support a separate division or more a kind of network of experts? What kind of support is provided? Is there group training involved,1:1 guidance, or is there a set of tools offered. And how do researchers get to know about the RDM support offered? The OpenAIRE task force on R...

This blog is an adaptation of a blogpost first published on the CREATe (UK Copyright and Creative Economy Centre, University of Glasgow) blog. Thanks to CREATe's PhD students Methinee Suwannakit, Zihao Li and Jiarong Zhang for collecting the notes used to prepare this blog.                                                                &n...

Portugal has been making an effort to develop information and capacity building initiatives for the different stakeholders in best practices and sharing of research data. This intention has already been expressed itself in several ways, through reports from the Working Group for National Open Science Policy, which recommended the urgent need to promote and enhance the skills of researchers, with regard to research data management and sharing research data, and throu...