Third series of OpenAIRE webinars in greek launched with a “train the trainer” webinar

The new series: The National Open Access Desks for Greece and Cyprus are back with yet another series of informative and training webinars in the greek language! In 2020, webinars focus on Open Science advocacy, use of Research Data Management (RDM) services, understanding GDPR from the perspective of researchers, writing Data Management Plans and identifying areas to collaborate with each other. Hence, target groups for the webinars are librarians, repository managers, researchers and european projects coordinators, students and anyone who is interested in learning about Open Science and Research Data. Next webinars are scheduled for April and May tackling repositories interoperability and GDPR, respectively.

Communicating Science: The first webinar of the Greek and Cypriot NOADs for 2020 focused on key aspects of Open Science and on benefits for communicating research, also known as Scholarly Communication. Guest speaker, Nancy Pontika from the Open University, delivered a presentation following a "train the trainer" methodology. She informed the audience about the subject and provided them with essential resources and tools to channel this knowledge to others.

Open science and research - How are they connected? Nancy started with an introduction to open science and more specifically she explained how open science is embedded in the research practice by using the research lifecycle as her guide.

Open Science aims at making available not only the final output of the research (e.g the publication) but also all the steps in-between, such as data collection, data analysis and preservation. It is a fact that the Open Science field consists of many areas and terms thus creating a confusion around it. Some Open Science areas are more mature and with rich training material than others. Nancy highlighted the importance of gaining more insight in less mature areas mentioning that FOSTER provides a taxonomy and some details on these areas. She also urged participants to become members of the Open Access Tracking Project and to help increase the information available in the greek language.

Within the framework it proposes, Open Science fosters synergies between all academic and research stakeholders involved in Scholarly Communication. Other benefits as mentioned by Nancy are greater dissemination of research outputs, scientific excellence of early career researchers and economic growth resulting from cost and time savings. Therefore, it becomes more clear why Open Science and Reproducible Research are becoming a priority for the EU, since it can accelerate innovation, technological development and scientific discovery.

Useful resources: Some tools that could support stakeholders awareness raising and literacy on Open Science are the following:

• OpenAIRE webinars and Open Science primers: webinars, guides and handbooks targeting all stakeholders, Open Science issues and Research Data Management stages.
  • How to publish papers in Open Access
  • What is Open Research Data and Data Management Plans
  • Open Access Basics
  • A Research Data Management Handbook
• FOSTER training courses and the Open Science Training Handbook: five learning routes (open peer reviewer, open reproducible researcher, responsible data sharer, open innovator accelerator and open access author) to get a certificate on and a manual for open science.
• Open Access Directory: factual lists about open access and research data events, resources, policies etc.

You may find the slides and recording of the webinar here.