HOSI 2024: A Milestone for Open Science

The 3rd Open Science Symposium, organized by the Hellenic Open Science Initiative (HOSI), took place in December 2024 in Athens. Supported by key Greek ministries, the event gathered researchers, policymakers, and industry experts to explore strategies for strengthening Open Science in Greece. A central theme was enhancing national coordination in Open Science policies, addressing challenges in policy implementation, institutional collaboration, and long-term sustainability.

OSTrails’ Role and Contributions

As part of its mission to foster interoperability and FAIRness in research, OSTrails actively participated in the symposium, presenting its Greek pilot in a dedicated poster session. The session highlighted OSTrails' contributions to Open Science infrastructure in Greece and its alignment with European initiatives.

Led by HEAL-Link and ARC—both key contributors to HOSI—with support from CITE SA, the Greek pilot showcased advancements in data repository interoperability. By leveraging the OpenAIRE Graph, the pilot enhances metadata enrichment and integrates repositories with tools that support FAIR data management. Key objectives of the OSTrails Greek Pilot include:

• Optimizing workflows for Research Data Management.

• Enhancing collaboration between researchers, institutions, and funders

• Boosting FAIR data output and Open Science adoption at a national level

At the core of these efforts is the P-T-A Framework, developed and continuously refined within OSTrails. This framework contributes to EOSC’s evolving interoperability model, ensuring seamless access and sharing of scientific data and services across research communities, institutions, countries, and the EU.

At the symposium, Natalia Manola (PC) moderated a panel discussion on Open Science policy in Greece, focusing on national strategies, institutional roles, and the need for a self-sustaining Open Science network. The session gathered key stakeholders to explore policy advancements and actionable steps toward strengthening Open Science across the country.

Meanwhile, Elli Papadopoulou (DC) led discussions on HOSI’s Policy Working Group, presenting efforts to revise the National Open Science Plan. Her session focused on research assessment policies, highlighting necessary reforms to enhance the evaluation of Open Science practices in Greek research institutions.

Discover More!

Learn how OSTrails is driving Open Science in Greece by exploring National Pilot Interview Greece. For insights into the 3rd HOSI Symposium and its impact on Open Science policy, read  Building Open Science Together: HOSI Driving Policy Adoption in Greece.

Explore the National Pilot Interview from Sweden to discover the latest updates on the OSTrails pilot studies. Dive into their national activities and learn about their progress in integrating open science with research assessment. This month, we had the pleasure of speaking with Johan Fihn Marberg and Olof Olsson from the Swedish National Data Service.

- Johan Fihn Marberg (Swedish National Data Service)		- Olof Olsson (Swedish National Data Service)

 "Participation in the OSTrails project will provide us with the opportunity to further increase the efficiency with which we can provide services to our end users."

-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How does it contribute to EOSC? 

The Swedish National Data Service (SND) is a national e-infrastructure co-funded by the Swedish Research Council and a consortium of nine universities and a network of almost 30 other universities and research organisations. SND provides researchers with a coordinated and quality assured system for finding, describing, and sharing research data.

SND has strong ties to EOSC as the representative organisation for the University of Gothenburg in the EOSC Association. SND is a designated competence center in Skills4EOSC and has members in various EOSC task forces and expert groups. 

-What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to? 

At SND, one of our main focuses is to provide researchers with easy solutions for publishing research data. With interoperable solutions between publishing systems and local storage solutions at universities, we are trying to ease the administrative burden on researchers. In the OSTrails project, we can further enhance the interoperability and metadata exchange between the SND publishing platform, DMP tools and CRIS systems at universities. We are especially interested in exploring the possibility of offering researchers a publishing experience that allows them to reuse all the metadata they have already provided in previous stages of the research lifecycle.

-How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your country? 

In Sweden, data management plans (DMPs) are required when applying for funding from major funding agencies. However, although DMPs are assessed by some universities, not all have the capacity to do so, and there is no structured follow-up on how researchers comply with the contents of the DMPs.

SND has produced a checklist for DMPs, which is followed and recommended by several Swedish universities. In the project, this checklist will be provided as a template in a DMP tool provided by Swedish universities. 

Research data published in the SND research data catalogue is assessed annually using FAIR metrics tools. We will explore how the interoperability enhancements made in this pilot will increase the FAIR score of published digital objects in the catalogue.

-What is your pilot about? Can you provide some details on the main actors, services and priorities? How will the results of OSTrails be adopted by your pilot? 

SND provides a research data publishing platform (DORIS) and a research data catalogue. One of the integrations recently deployed in DORIS integrates SweCRIS to enable the import and linking of project and funding information when the researchers describe their data in DORIS. SweCRIS includes funding information from 13 funders and currently has about 60000 projects listed in the database from 2008 to 2024.

SND is currently building a new discovery portal, researchdata.se, for Swedish research data where we focus on machine readable metadata and providing best practices for metadata publishing to make research output as FAIR as possible. The researchdata.se portal, to be launched in early 2025, will provide a search portal for data from several Swedish research infrastructures as well as guides for data documentation and sharing.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps?   

We are currently working on implementing an integration between the DORIS system and the local DMP tool, based on DSWizard, at Chalmers Technical University to facilitate metadata exchange between the tools. We are also exploring ways to further this collaboration and increase awareness of OSTrails among other stakeholders in the Swedish research data landscape. 

SND is also currently developing a centralised maDMP index to enable metadata reuse from DMP tools when publishing research data in DORIS.

Thank you both!

Explore the National Pilot Interview from France to discover the latest updates on the OSTrails pilot studies. Dive into their national activities and learn about their progress in integrating open science with research assessment. This month, we had the pleasure of speaking with Laurent Romary and Maud Medves from Inria.

- Laurent Romary (Inria, Scientific Information and Culture)	- Maud Medves (Inria, Scientific Information and Culture Direction, Scientific Information Department)

"Integrating standardised software references in machine-actionable DMPs is an important way of signalling how important software is for the creation, transformation or visualisation of research data. Beyond digital science, we aim at generalising such practice to all scholarly fields."

-Can you briefly introduce your organisation? How does it contribute to EOSC? 

Inria is the French national research institute for digital science and technology and gathers over 220 research teams in various scientific fields ranging from digital health to high performance computing. It focuses on research activities in digital science but also leads open science activities (e.g., having pioneered OS software infrastructure by co-founding Software Heritage , taking part in national initiatives on open science in France, development of the French OS monitor). 

Inria is the EOSC mandated organisation for France and is involved in several EOSC projects such as FAIRCORE4EOSC, FAIR-IMPACT and GraspOS. 

As the mandated organisation, Inria takes an active part within the French network of EOSC members, under the auspices of the French Ministry for Higher Education of Research, with the aim of bringing forward, as part of the French contribution to EOSC, the various national infrastructures available in the domains of publication, data and software. 

-What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to? 

OSTrails is an exciting opportunity for us to improve the way we handle DMP as a component of the research data life cycle. Writing a DMP is often perceived as an administrative burden by project investigators. We do hope that introducing machine-actionable DMPs which can be, to some extent, the basis for further documentations associated with research digital objects (e.g. when deposited in open archives), will be a huge step forward for researchers and their institutions.  

We also look forward to including in maDMPs the description of source code or software that helped creating or handling the corresponding datasets. This is very important in our community, in which software is a central research output. We also hope that it will be an incentive for researchers to better describe their source code and software in open archives, rather than just store them in a git repository. In this respect, Software Heritage, with its systematic archiving of all open-source software code and association of persistent intrinsic identifiers (aka SWHId), provides a solid background for making such references in maDMPs.  

The project will also help us define an institutional policy at Inria concerning research data management at large. 

-How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your country? 

Planning: research planning is mainly addressed at Inria through the support to researchers in writing Data Management Plans (DMP). In France the widely used DMP writing tool is DMP Opidor, which is used by most universities and research performing organisations. Inria is no exception. This online tool allows each institution to customize institutional recommendations for their researchers; support staff can also have access to DMPs drafted by their researchers and provide assistance in enhancing them. 

Tracking: France has the chance of having a unique national publication repository (HAL) available to all institutions for recording their research outputs. Inria has developed a specific policy with a publication mandate in HAL which we are planning to extend to make sure we connect publications with datasets and software. At national level we also track our open science performance in the context of the French Open Science Monitor.  

Assessing: at Inria, the RDM unit staff manually reviews DMPs on request before submission to funders. Funders, whether national (ANR) or European (European Commission), usually perform simple checks of DMPs. At Inria, the Evaluation Committee (the body responsible for assessing the level of excellence of the research conducted at the institute and guaranteeing the level of its recruitment and internal promotions) takes into account work related to software development when conducting annual assessment campaigns. As such Inria policy is fully in based with the direction taken by COARA at international level. 

-What is your pilot about? Can you provide some details on the main actors, services and priorities? How will the results of OSTrails be adopted by your pilot? 

Inria is the unique actor of the French pilot. Though we are focussing on a very specific aspect (source code and software), we will be working closely with partners involved in the French ecosystem of Recherche Data Gouv (our national data repository). Partners of the RDM geographical clusters (Ateliers de la Donnée) as well as the Opidor resource center (Centre de ressources outils communs aux ateliers) will be regularly updated on the project’s progress so that we can integrate OS Trails outputs in the French national tool DMP Opidor.

-Ongoing activities and Next Steps?   

We are currently focussing on ensuring the coherence between activities conducted on machine-actionable DMPs and international standards used to describe software, so that a software component can be introduced smoothly in maDMPs. Such references to software within a maDMP should be expressed in a way compatible with the international software description standard CodeMeta, so that one can directly point to the corresponding entry in Software Heritage.

Thank you both!

OSTrails going global

The last edition of the RDA Plenary Meeting that took place in Costa Rica, found many OSTrails partners in the rainy paths of San Jose while others enjoyed the event online using the Whova app. OSTrails was represented by Elli Papadopoulou (ARC), Marek Suchánek (CVUT), Tomasz Miksa (TUWien), Anca Hienola (FMI), Susanna-Assunta Sansone (UOXF), Wim Hugo (Dans/Knaw), Daan Broeder (CLARIN), Tassos Stavropoulos (OpenAIRE).

OSTrails Partners Onsite at RDA Plenary.

In both cases, participation was active in different sessions to communicate the project’s approaches to advancing FAIR principles and interoperability with a focus on enhancing Data Management Plans (DMPs), integrating Persistent Identifiers (PIDs), and fostering a FAIR Digital Object ecosystem. These included topics like ensuring the quality and sustainability of data management, gamifying RDM practices, leveraging tools for curation, and advancing global recommendations for research commons. Specifically, for the latter the dedicated session on DMPs emphasised OSTrails’ commitment to collaborating and aligning practices globally by establishing a common maDMP API and refining interoperability frameworks.

Towards a common API for maDMPs

Co-chairs of the Active DMPs and DMP Common Standards groups—Elli Papadopoulou (DC), Tomasz Miksa (TM), and Marek Suchánek (WPL)—led the session “Active Data Management Plans: What are the actions that we need to realize them?”. Rooted in the Salzburg Manifesto, the agenda was centred on forming new working groups to address API actions and DMP extensions, aligning efforts with initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) and DataCite's DMP_IDs. It presented a draft Case Statement, solicited feedback to create a 12–18-month workplan, and encouraged community engagement to refine objectives and establish a comprehensive roadmap for maDMP adoption and interoperability. The session served as a platform to present preliminary results from the OSTrails project, including the Plan-Track-Assess Pathways and interoperability frameworks outlined in early project deliverables (D1.1: Plan-Track-Assess Pathways, M4_Interim Products Establishment for Cross-Task Collaboration).

OSTrailers were joined by other RDA community contributors who shared their views and activities towards advancing maDMPs in their regions. Becky Grady from the University of California highlighted enhancements in the DMP Tool that is widely used in the US, including ongoing developments to make it fully machine-actionable and integrate API-based functionalities. Elli Papadopoulou from ARC presented the European perspective reflected in the OSTrails PTA framework, emphasising planning, tracking, and assessing data management aligned with FAIR principles. Marek Suchánek from CVUT addressed maintenance efforts for the RDA DMP Common Standard, while Tomasz Miksa from TUWien introduced the idea for a new working group that is centred around a standardised API, aimed at increasing technical interoperability of maDMPs.

OSTrails PTA Framework.
Community discussions - Takeaways

Interactive discussions explored the different applications of maDMPs across different settings e.g. research infrastructure vs funding-oriented, including their adoption in tracking research outputs and aligning with evolving metadata standards. Participants stressed the importance of fostering interoperability among Research Data Management (RDM) tools and services, addressing challenges like balancing technical complexity with usability. The session concluded with concrete next steps, such as submitting a proposal for the new working group, finalising updates to the DMP Common Standard, and encouraging broader community engagement through shared resources and pilots.

Learn more:

• Presentation slides

• RDA DMP Common Standards GitHub

• DMP Common Standards WG