Highlights from OSFair 2025: OpenREL and the future of rights in Open Science
From paper licences to machine-readable rights
The Open Science Fair 2025, hosted at CERN's Science Gateway, brought together leading voices from research infrastructures, funders, and data communities to explore one of the most pressing challenges in the age of AI and federated science: how can we make rights and responsibilities as interoperable as the data they govern?
The session "Introducing OpenREL: Rights Expression Languages for Open Science and International Data Spaces – A Practitioners' Approach", organised by OpenAIRE and DANS under the EOSC Beyond project, set out to address exactly that question. Led by Prodromos Tsiavos, Wim Hugo, Melios Katsamakis, Deborah Thorpe, and Sotiris Minogiannis, the 90-minute workshop introduced OpenREL, a rights expression language being developed within EOSC Beyond to serve as the cornerstone of a future EOSC Digital Rights Vocabulary.
A hands-on experiment in rights negotiation
Rather than a traditional presentation, the OpenREL workshop transformed the concept of "rights expression" into a collaborative simulation game. Participants were divided into small groups representing four key stakeholder roles - Research Performing Organisations (RPOs), Research Funding Organisations (RFOs), researchers, and LLM developers - mirroring the diverse actors in EOSC's federated ecosystem.
Each team was given scenario sheets and rights cards derived from the OpenREL prototype vocabulary, encompassing copyright, GDPR, ethics, and terms of service. Through structured negotiation and role-play, they expressed their positions as simplified JSON-based rights statements, simulating how rights logic could be exchanged automatically between services and data spaces.
This hands-on approach embodied EOSC Beyond's principle of "from concepts to practice", helping participants experience how digital rights governance could work in a federated, machine-actionable environment.
What participants discovered
- The urgent need for machine-actionable rights metadata supporting legal, ethical, and contractual layers.
- The importance of distinguishing between "rights in" and "rights out" within the EOSC data lifecycle.
- The potential for OpenREL to bridge human-readable and machine-readable layers, aligning with EOSC's FAIR and trusted data principles.
Why it matters
Developed under EOSC Beyond, OpenREL aims to create a shared digital rights vocabulary capable of capturing Intellectual Property, Personal Data, Ethics, and Terms of Service in a harmonised, machine-readable format. The framework builds on existing standards such as ODRL and ccREL, extending them to accommodate the richer, federated reality of Open Science.
By combining legal expertise with practical experimentation, the workshop illustrated how OpenREL contributes directly to EOSC Beyond's mission: enabling a trusted European data ecosystem where legal and ethical interoperability underpin the technical one.
What's next
Insights from the CERN workshop are now shaping the OpenREL roadmap and upcoming deliverables in EOSC Beyond WP13. The next steps include:
- Expanding the JSON card set and refining the vocabulary.
- Testing OpenREL integration with Zenodo, DANS, and the OpenAIRE Graph.
- Designing a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for rights-aware data exchange across EOSC and other data spaces.
Building on this success, OpenAIRE and DANS will continue the exercise in digital form through the OpenREL Puzzle App, showcased during the International Open Access Week 2025, ensuring broader community participation and feedback.
In summary
The OpenREL workshop at CERN demonstrated that rights expression can evolve from static legal text to a living, participatory layer of Open Science. Within EOSC Beyond, this effort marks a decisive step toward making Open Science not only technically interoperable, but also legally and ethically FAIR.
