Written by Franziska Krauss,  Giulia Malaguarnera, Athina Papadopoulou, Shanmugasundaram Venkataraman 

EOSC Symposium on 14-17 November 2022 in Prague, gave an opportunity to gather delegates from the European Commission, the EOSC Association and participants of projects related to EOSC, including EOSC Future. These together form what has been termed the EOSC Tripartite Collaboration.

EOSC is a key component in the European Research Area (ERA) Policy Agenda, serving as a federation of services and enabling researchers to perform Open Science, thus it is considered a point of reference for stakeholders in research. As well as being a federated interoperable data infrastructure, expected outcomes from EOSC include identifying best practices in research and facilitating the monitoring of research investments, policies, digital research products (input and output) and the required Open Science skills.

The Launch of the EOSC Observatory 

One of the main achievements during the Symposium was the launch of the EOSC Observatory, a policy intelligence tool developed by OpenAIRE and Technopolis Group. The EOSC Observatory was born from a collaboration between the EOSC Future project and the EOSC Steering Board with an aim to track the readiness of MS/AC in Open Science policies, practices, and research impacts. It consists of a platform for running and analysing survey responses in the back-end, and a data visualisation tool in the front-end. New features on data exploitation and monitoring by the EOSC community will be further developed in the coming months of the EOSC Future project. In the mid-and long-term, the EOSC Observatory aims to serve as part of the ERA’s monitoring mechanism and as a platform to collect and track relevant information for Open Science and EOSC. 

The EOSC Platform and beyond: a community effort case 

During the Symposium, the latest version of the EOSC Platform was announced. This release was made possible in part thanks to the effective teamwork that OpenAIRE has put together with e-infrastructures and clusters. Feedback from the National e-infrastructures Focus Group, in which members of OpenAIRE are active, was reported and discussed during the Engagement of research communities and providers session. Positive reactions and appreciation from scientists and infrastructures demonstrated the significant role that the OpenAIRE Research Graph plays by aggregating and contextualising the data for EOSC, Europe, and at the global level. Moreover, EOSC Future is continuing to work hard on technical development and interoperability guidelines. Aiding these efforts, ongoing consultations are performed to increase the usability of the EOSC Portal, facilitating the onboarding of the resources and discussing the metadata schemas with the EOSC thematic clusters.

OpenAIRE Services for EOSC and the research lifecycle 

The services in the INFRAEOSC-07 projects are part of the EOSC Exchange efforts to offer researchers meaningful services to facilitate Open Science best practices. In this context, OpenAIRE Nexus is contributing to the EOSC scholarly communication ecosystem with the discovery, data management and publishing infrastructures. OpenAIRE Nexus is the current project supporting the development, interoperability, and EOSC integration of the OpenAIRE Services, and this new OpenAIRE catalogue of services was presented at the Symposium, showing the research community needs which motivated the OpenAIRE team in creating a more user-friendly design. Now OpenAIRE services are linked with the full research lifecycle to facilitate the uptake of Open Science in daily activities.

At OpenAIRE, we complement the shift to Open Science with a Service Design approach focusing on Effectiveness, Ease and Emotion. We want to create services we love, and users fall in love with – Androniki Pavlidou,  Services Portfolio Manager

The OpenAIRE team actively participated in the EOSCSymposium22!

"We contributed to the rich programme by highlighting how our services enable
compliance, visibility and discoverywithin the EOSC ecosystem.
We also took part in the exhibition where we had the chance to meet and interact with other participants." 

Supporting interoperability, statistics, FAIR assessment and EOSC onboarding 

OpenAIRE showed the key functionalities of OpenAIRE PROVIDE as a dashboard in which to check the validation, error tracking, data history and updates on data sources visible in EOSC. OpenAIRE PROVIDE is a gateway to EOSC for Data Providers, who can be in control of the tracking of metadata and the statistical analysis which derives from data usage (service available by downloading and installing OpenAIRE’s Usage Counts).  

The presentations of the "Covering your needs at every stage of research: the OpenAIRE Services in a nutshell" session can be found here:
 https://symposium22.eoscfuture.eu/symposium/instruments-to-support-the-research-life-cycle-the-openaire-nexus-catalogue-in-a-nutshell/  

Towards Open Science Training and Skills in EOSC 

Essential to the success of new services and resources in EOSC are support and training. This requires from one side the production and collection of catalogues and learning resources from different stakeholders, and on the other, a platform in which to operate the learning and training. EOSC Future showcased its work in this effort, describing the new EOSC Knowledge Hub and learning resources that are being developed, and those pre-existing ones that are being harvested as well as the underlying metadata for these, and also how the training and skills team are conducting their work.  

Four full days of presentations, workshops, discussions, and a chance to meet with peers and the broader community in Prague. Our team had the opportunity to expand and elaborate on a spectrum of EOSC-related topics, present OpenAIRE Services and contribute to broader discussions. A shout-out to our colleagues who represented OpenAIRE in the best possible way, congratulations to the organizers for making this happen and being such excellent hostesses and hats off to all the vision-driven EOSC community people across Europe for being part of this amazing EOSC journey.

 Till next time!