Workshop Highlights: Collaborative Pathways to Responsible Research Assessment via Open Infrastructures

OpenAIRE hosted the second workshop in its series on Collaborative Pathways to Responsible Research Assessment (RRA) via Open Infrastructures, following the first successful hands-on session at the Open Science Fair 2025 at CERN. This new workshop brought together a diverse community of research managers, infrastructure providers, policy specialists, and open science practitioners committed to advancing RRA by understanding what infrastructures need to deliver in practice.

The workshop continued to put into action the CoARA Working Group on Open Infrastructures for RRA (OI4RRA) checklist, a practical tool designed to help institutions and service providers evaluate the readiness of infrastructures across four dimensions: technical strength, operational excellence, community governance, and ethical and accountable practices. The aim of this second session was to test the checklist more deeply, surface real implementation challenges, and draw insights into what infrastructures must provide to enable sustainable and CoARA-aligned assessment reform.

Setting the Scene: From Principles to Operational Pathways

Angeliki Tzouganatou (OpenAIRE) opened the workshop by highlighting the shift from why institutions need to reform research assessment to how they can actually implement such change responsibly. A Mentimeter exercise revealed shared challenges among participants; financial pressures, cultural resistance, data quality issues, and the lack of interoperable infrastructures, underscoring the importance of coordinated community action.

Participants were then introduced to the two systems that would be evaluated in the breakout sessions:

• MyResearchFolio, OpenAIRE's pilot researcher profile service, introduced by Zenia Xenou (OpenAIRE), designed to support narrative CVs and more inclusive representations of research contributions.
• GraspOS Meta-Catalogue, an open catalogue from Athena Research Center (ARC), presented by Thanasis Vergoulis (ARC) aggregating datasets, tools, policies, and templates relevant to OS-aware RRA.

Breakout Insights: What Infrastructures need to support RRA

MyResearchFolio

Participants praised MyResearchFolio for its clean interface, structured navigation, and ability to synthesise information into narrative CVs. The platform's potential to reduce administrative burden was clear, and its integration with ORCID and OpenAIRE data sources offers a solid foundation for interoperability.

However, several areas were identified for improvement to strengthen its alignment with institutional needs:

• Enhancing portability and data export, including enabling export to formats such as Europass.
• Refining the ORCID initialization process, especially for users in regions where ORCID is less common.
• Ensuring DOIs are fully clickable and resolve directly to the source of the research output.
• Introducing the ability to link to other researcher profiles within the platform.
• Expanding supported output types to reflect the diversity of scholarly contributions.
• Addressing metric reliability, including potential inflation caused by bot traffic.

GraspOS Meta-Catalogue

The GraspOS Meta-Catalogue was recognised for having a strong foundation: openness, DOI support, broad output coverage, no personal data collection, and synchronisation with established infrastructures like Zenodo and the OpenAIRE Services Catalogue.

However, various gaps were identified that currently limit its readiness for institutional adoption:

• There is a need for more detailed user documentation and additional training materials.
• Unclear onboarding and curation policies: A transparent policy for onboarding resources into the meta-catalogue and for their ongoing curation should be established.
• There is an absence of an open API, which limits integration and reuse.
• The interface is provided only in English, reducing accessibility.
• Sustainability risks: The dependency on a single organisation (Athena RC) for sustainability and maintenance poses a risk; alternative governance models should be considered

Next Steps: Strengthening the Path to Open Assessment

The workshop concluded with concrete actions emerging from both breakout groups.

For MyResearchFolio, OpenAIRE will explore enhancements to export functionality, onboarding workflows, DOI linking, profile interoperability, and output type coverage. These developments aim to improve usability and reduce barriers to adoption.

For the GraspOS Meta-Catalogue, Athena RC will consider developing an open API, enhancing user documentation, clarifying governance and curation processes, and investigating multilingual support— all areas highlighted as essential for future sustainability.

Institutions are also committed to strengthening their own data curation workflows feeding into the OpenAIRE Graph, exploring mechanisms to flag unreliable metadata, and continuing to test the checklist across different infrastructure contexts.

Looking Forward

This second workshop reinforced a central insight shared across the RRA community: open, transparent, interoperable infrastructures are not a "nice-to-have", they are foundational to meaningful research assessment reform. By collaboratively applying the OI4RRA checklist, participants collectively identified what infrastructures must provide to help institutions implement CoARA principles in practice.

Together with the outcomes of the first workshop at CERN, this session contributes to a growing evidence base that will inform future iterations of the checklist and support coordinated, scalable pathways toward responsible research assessment across Europe and beyond.