Recent News-Activities-Blogs
Embedding Amnesia, OpenAIRE’s free and open-source software, in COVID-19 research workflows to enable secure processing and sharing of sensitive data
Background: Since the beginning of the pandemic, 'ΑΤΗΕΝΑ' Research Center has been active in communicating best practices and achievements from the national and European R&I ecosystems to the Greek academic and research communities. To maximize the impact of this effort for the benefit of researchers and health practitioners, the OpenAIRE Greek NOAD has been collaborating with national stakeholders and initiatives from different domains (e.g. SSH, Bioinformatics, Computer Science, Public Management) to both support diverse research endeavors and offer opportunities for discussion about strengths and weaknesses observed in the followed approaches.
Practical workshops: In continuation of the COVID-19 series, more practical workshops are foreseen to enhance community understanding of the use of available tools as well as to build capacity on specific aspects in the COVID-19 research data lifecycle.
The workshop that was held in June 2021 ran together with the OpenAIRE NOAD in Cyprus and concentrated on the processing of data that carry sensitive and personal information taking as a use case real data from medical records of a hospital in the United Kingdom. Moreover, OpenAIRE's anonymization tool "Amnesia" was demonstrated as a tool that can be embedded in COVID-19 research workflows to enable personal identifiers' removal with guarantees.
Presentation and demo: Guest speaker and trainer for the needs of the workshop was Manolis Terrovitis, who is the creator of the Amnesia tool. Manolis started with a presentation to set the basis of the legal framework pertaining to sensitive information (GDPR) and Open Access restrictions in Europe. The presentation went on to communicate data security and privacy methods, including encryption, and highlighted the two most commonly used anonymization techniques stating that they are usually misused by researchers:
- Anonymization that transforms personal data into exploitable non-personal data so they can be re-used or exposed or given to third parties without limitations, e.g. GDPR. The anonymization process offers guaranties that original data cannot be retrieved,
- Pseudo-anonymization that removes direct identifiers while retaining secondary information. The pseudo-anonymized data are partially protected, but they remain personal data and can lead to the recognition of a person when reverse engineering is applied.
In order to comply with Open Access principles, the preferred method is anonymization with guarantees, such as those characterizing k- and km- anonymity techniques.
Amnesia is a free and open-source software that can be downloaded and installed locally in all operating systems (Windows, Linux, etc).
It is a unique tool for implementing anonymization to set-valued data. Despite its complexity and the different algorithms that it runs, its interface is simple and user-friendly.
The way Amnesia works is as follows:
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Hands-on and discussion: During the workshop, Manolis answered all the questions posed by the participants and had one-on-one break out sessions with those who needed more assistance. The discussions mainly focused on understanding the proper use of Amnesia in the different contexts and domains represented by participants and how anonymization is integrated in third party systems. Clarifications and tips included specific steps of the anonymization process in Amnesia, like the rounding of continuous variables where Manolis suggested selecting the largest range in the data to achieve the major accuracy.
In June 30th, an Amnesia open to all seminar was organised, where participants could experience and learn how anonymization of data is performed with it. Organisers 'Athena' Research Center, as part of the activities of the OpenAIRE NOAD in Greece, supported and launched this informative and educational online seminar, in support of research activities relevant to the coronavirus disease. This seminar run in collaboration with the OpenAIRE NOAD in Cyprus. Short description The ...
At the beginning of June 2021, The National Strategy for Open Science 2021 - 2028, with its first Action Plan 2021 - 2022, was adopted by the Slovak government (both in the Slovak language are uploaded below, English version of the National Strategy will be available in September 2021). The creation of the National Strategy is an integral part of the Action Plan of the Open Government Partnership Initiative 2020-2021. The Slovak Centre of Scientific and Technical Information (Slovak NOAD) active...
Over 320 people from Poland and around the world participated in the launch event of the Library of Science organized on June 15, 2021. The new website was inaugurated as part of the 'Platform of Polish Scientific Publications' project by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling, University of Warsaw (ICM UW). The Library of Science - the new version of the platform An introductory speech was given by Marek Michalewicz, director of ICM UW, who presented the...
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...
OpenAIRE is working to adapt the FAIR RDA Data Maturity Model indicators in our OpenAIRE Validator. The Validator is available to every logged-in user via the PROVIDE dashboard and is intended to provide an impression of the FAIRness of their repository. The FAIR Maturity Model Indicators, as core criteria to assess the implementation level of the FAIR (Data) principles, implemented in the OpenAIRE Validator, aims to offer to the datasource managers, a way to assess the implementation of FAIR (D...
OpenAIRE PROVIDE allows for registration of content providers that are compatible with OpenAIRE guidelines. By registering in OpenAIRE, content providers are becoming a building block of a global Open Research community, a gateway to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). Over the years several repositories have joined OpenAIRE, contributing to build the OpenAIRE Research Graph, which collects metadata records from more than 70K scholarly communication sources from all over the world, including...
Background: In the framework of the NI4OS-Europe project, ATHENA Research and Innovation Center (ATHENA) developed tools that respond to emerging Open and FAIR Research Data Management (RDM) demands of researchers and provide a first set of clarity for EOSC resource providers' compliance with the Rules of Participation (RoP). NI4OS-Europe is the European project that supports the development and inclusion of National Open Science Cloud Initiatives (NOSCIs) in 15 south-east european member states...
The OpenAIRE Research Graph is gradually becoming a key asset of OpenAIRE. We are investing a lot of effort in its development and improvement. Quality, inclusiveness, transparency and open governance are key in our thinking, but underneath all, there is a huge ongoing technical effort for making it robust and usable for discovery and monitoring. Many of our users are asking us to know more about what the graph is about? Why do we need one and what does OpenAIRE Graph bring in? We listened ...
About: On April 23, 2021 the University of Cyprus Library organized an Open Science event to update on the latest developments of European Research and Innovation actions, mainly focusing around the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) developments. The event welcomed 65 participants spanning from academics, researchers to policy makers, funders, librarians and Open Science enthusiasts. Agenda: The Cypriot Open Science event was organized in the context of the National Initiatives for Open Science...
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