Open Science Workshop, Ljubljana, 23 January 2020

The workshop was organized by the Commission for Research and Development Work of the University of Ljubljana and the Slovenian OpenAIRE-Advance National Open Access Desk. The programme, presentations and videos are available at the Open Science Archived Events webpage.

The workshop opened with an overview of open science and presentations of the latest activities on (super)computing in Slovenia. Then a representative of the FAIRsFAIR project presented FAIR assessment of research data, and a representative of the EOSCsecretariat.eu the EOSC. Certain national research infrastructures are members of the ESFRI Landmarks and will be onboarded to the EOSC through SSHOC and EOSC-Life. The latter two were presented in the plenary session. In the parallel sessions (on social sciences and humanities, and on natural sciences, technics, biotechnics and medicine), disciplinary research data management for FAIR and open research data was presented as well as disciplinary tools and services in the EOSC.

Open science is becoming default in the European Research Area - within the EU Framework Programmes and in national research funding. With the workshop, the Slovenian stakeholders were offered the latest information on open science developments in the ERA. The interest to attend the workshop in person or watch the videostreaming was very low. It seems that Slovenian stakeholders still did not recognize the benefits of open science for research and the society.

All presentations were excellent and contain relevant information on the latest state-of-the-art and developments. Hereinafter, space-limited, we are able share only some of the information delivered.

Supercomputing, the EOSC and FAIR assessment of research data

Opportunities of the HPC RIVR project for Slovenian researchers, Prof Dr Zoran Ren, Project Manager, University of Maribor
The new national supercomputing centre will offer services and tools for open science to Slovenian researchers, among others infrastructure for open research data and their preservation. Commerce and industry will be able to use the supercomputing facility for HPC simulations and analysis. It will also serve as a modern education platform for students. Through becoming member in PRACE, EGI and ESFRI, HPC RIVR will provide services and tools to the EOSC.

EOSC, its community and governance, Mr Andrea Grisilla, Project Manager and Coordinator of the EOSCsecretariat.eu project, Technopolis Group
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) will use the internet to enable an open science ecosystem for 1.7 million European researchers. An open research data commons (including all disciplines and all EU Member States) and an open virtual research environment are being built. Within the EOSC governance structure, Stakeholders Forum advises on implementation, Governance Board with Executive Board and working groups steers it, and the EU, national and other projects and initiatives are providing tools and services. The EOSCsecretariat.eu project supports and coordinates the activities and has a budget for the EOSC co-creation. Everybody is most welcome to apply for co-creation funding.

FAIR assessment of research data, Dr Anusuriya Devaraju, a data scientist at PANGAEA, the MARUM-University of Bremen, which is a partner in the FAIRsFAIR project
Fifteen FAIR principles for research data are high-level guidelines and therefore open to various interpretations so FAIR metrics and tools have been developed, taking disciplinary practices into account. The FAIRsFAIR project is providing support for the use of FAIR principles throughout the research data life cycle. Researchers need to be aware and educated on FAIR principles, and trustworthy data repositories will assess FAIRness of published datasets.

Social Sciences and Humanities Open Cloud (SSHOC)

The SSHOC project, presented by Mrs Irena Vipavc Brvar, MSc, from the Social Science Data Archives at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana, is coordinating creation of the social sciences and humanities part of the EOSC. SSHOC is also offering training events, train-the-trainer toolkit and bootcamps. Within the TRIPLE project, a multilingual and multicultural discovery platform will be built to find and reuse social sciences and humanities data, tools and services.

Among the ESFRI Landmarks, participating in the SSHOC, are also ERICs with Slovenian members, i.e., CESSDA, CLARIN and DARIAH-EU.

Assist Prof Dr Janez Štebe from the Social Science Data Archives at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Ljubljana (ADP) presented CESSDA ERIC and ADP activities. These organizations are offering all-encompassing support for research data to the social sciences and humanities researchers. General information on research data management is being disseminated to other disciplines through the RDA Node Slovenia.

CLARIN ERIC, presented by Assoc Prof Dr Darja Fišer from the Faculty of Arts of the University of Ljubljana and Jožef Stefan Institute, is offering tools and services for language resources and technologies for FAIR and open science.

CLARIN.SI is a Slovenian research infrastructure that is providing certified language resources and tools repository, web services and support. It was presented by Dr Tomaž Erjavec from the Department of Knowledge Technologies of the Jožef Stefan Institute.

Assist Prof Dr Jurij Hadalin from the Institute of Contemporary History and the University of Primorska told that DARIAH ERIC is a distributed infrastructure for digital humanities, incorporating many different research fields. This thematic variety results in many services and tools, tailored to the individual research fields.

Dr Andrej Pančur from the Institute of Contemporary History spoke about DARIAH-SI that supports all phases of the research data life cycle in the digital humanities. Frequently, cultural objects are research data in the humanities, their digital surrogates enable additional investigation and interpretation.

Open cloud for the European life science, biological and medical research (EOSC-Life)

Assist Prof Dr Branimir L Leskošek from the Institute for Biostatistics and Medical Informatics of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Ljubljana presented EOSC-Life, ELIXIR ERIC and ELIXIR-SI. EOSC-Life is interconnecting European health and food infrastructures, providing life science data resources and an ecosystem of innovative life‐science tools to the EOSC. EOSC-Life is working with other EOSC clusters, e.g., SSHOC.

The ELIXIR ERIC has established technical platforms for computing, data, tools, interoperability, and training. ELIXIR Slovenia Node is enabling data science and the dry lab, the wet lab for data generation and offers training, education and capacity building. ELIXIR-SI Helpdesk supports data management planning and use of bioinformatics tools and services. ELIXIR-SI will also use the HPC RIVR services.

Research data management

Mr Peter Čerče from Science and Research Centre Koper shared practical experiences and tools that MiCREATE H2020 project has used to plan and manage research data, catering also for sensitive data. DMPonline, CESSDA Data Management Expert Guide, and Social Sciences Data Archives (ADP) were used or consulted. The MiCREATE project is about migrant children and communities and even anonymization cannot ensure non-traceability of interviewees in local communities.

Assist Prof Dr Sebastian Dahle from the Biotechnical Faculty of the University of Ljubljana presented data management planning for FAIR and open research data within the PlasmaSolution MSCA H2020 project. Experiences have led the project to the following conclusions: data management planning and openness of research data are absolutely worthwhile, platforms, services and support are readily available, use of standardized procedures as well as mandatory training are strongly suggested.

Dr Ana Slavec from InnoRenew CoE listed the challenges of research data management in technical disciplines (technical challenges: lack of metadata standards, ontologies, and thematic repositories; social challenges: fear of loosing competitive advantage as well as of misuse and wrong interpretation of data, industry not supportive of data sharing). Open science needs to be included into doctoral study programmes, support is needed for disciplines without data infrastructures and data stewards as well as change of research assessment.