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On October 9-11, DI4R 2018, the third edition of the Digital Infrastructure for Research conferences, took place in the University of Lisbon, Portugal. Building on the success of DI4R2016 in Krakow and DI4R2017 in Brussels, DI4R2018 was jointly organised by OpenAIRE, EOSC-hub, GÉANT and PRACE. This year's co-chairs were Sinéad Ryan from Trinity College and Volker Guelkow from DESY.

OpenAIRE’s sessions

The conference offered many interesting sessions and opportunities for networking among the participants and lively discussions on how to best meet the needs of researchers in all stages of the research life-cycle. OpenAIRE organised three main sessions with a main focus on Open Science (OS), and was also involved in multiple others:

‘Who and the How of Open Science’ session

In this session, Prof. Eva Mendez from the University Carlos III, Madrid, gave a keynote speech on Open Science, how it helps institutions and researchers to advance research, and how it could be integrated in the institution’s workflows to become a best practice in the daily research activities. Prof. Mendez also explored the connection between Open Science and open infrastructures (like the EOSC) and standards, and the importance of managing the long-tail of science.

Dr. Paolo Manghi, OpenAIRE’s Technical director, presented how OpenAIRE’s monitoring dashboards, harnessing OpenAIRE’s powerful scholarly communication graph, can address the needs in monitoring and supporting Open Science for various stakeholders, such as researchers, funders, content providers and research communities.

The round table offering the funders’ perspective involved three different point of views, from the research funder (Joao Nuno Ferreira, FCT) explaining the need for effectively monitoring the funded research outputs; to the national perspective (Mojca Kotar, University of Ljubljana) examining the implementation strategy for OS at the national level, including research infrastructures, how the national initiatives relate to the EOSC and what is still missing for a full success; to the research manager perspective (João Dias, ISCTE-IUL), highlighting the challenges in implementing Open Science policies and best practices in the closed environment of an institution.

‘Building better collaborative national networks to support Open Science’ session

In this session, we discussed some of the best practices in OpenAIRE’s, GÉANT’s, RDA Europe’s and EGI/EOSC-hub’s national networks.

The breakout groups, divided in “regions”, led to exchange of ideas and information around several topics, like the need to improve the collaboration among different networks at the national level (e.g. libraries and research infrastructures), the urgency for coordinated training activities that can help all stakeholders and interested Research Infrastructures (RIs) users to fully exploit all benefits deriving from a better understanding and knowledge of OS policies and RIs. We also explored the need for a better circulation of skills and expertise among European countries, as the more open the minds are, the easier is for OS to root. The RIs organising this session are planning to keep on discussing these themes in ICT2018 in Vienna, so stay tuned for more information on this!

The last OpenAIRE session focused on the development of the OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard. This dashboard serves research communities, by assisting them to publish research artefacts and monitor the impact of both the community and the research output. After an introduction on the purposes of the session and the dashboard, two use cases of communities that already use the dashboard presented their experience with the tool, helping the participants to fully understand the tangible benefits of such a service (Stéphane Pesant of the Universität Bremen for the European Marine Science community and Sorina Pop from CNRS for the Neuroinformatics community). A live demo of the Research Community Dashboard and the presentation of the integration with Zenodo, OpenAIRE’s catch-all repository, concluded the session.

All presentations are available on the OpenAIRE SlideShare channel. Looking forward to DI4R2019!