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An interactive webinar about the Open Research Gateway for ELIXIR-GR Infrastructure

Background: Following a successful cooperation between the OpenAIRE Greek NOAD and the ELIXIR-GR Node, a webinar was organised to present the ELIXIR-GR Open Research Gateway both to the ELIXIR-GR research community and to Health Science librarians. The Research Gateways are part of the OpenAIRE Connect service and serve as portals that collect and distribute in one single entry point all research artefacts produced by a given discipline/community, including various services and tools.

Agenda: The webinar invited speakers from OpenAIRE, RDA and ELIXIR to inform participants about new services available for research in health science and bioinformatics and about tailored support provided through their networks. Moreover, participants were able to explore the functionalities of the Open Research Gateway for the ELIXIR-GR Infrastructure during a live demo where they also provided feedback and suggestions to the beta version.

Introductory presentations: The webinar kicked off with Thanasis Vergoulis from Athena Research Center, ELIXIR-GR and key member of the curation team of the ELIXIR-GR Open Research Gateway. Thanasis welcomed participants and provided an overview of ELIXIR-GR, its connection to ELIXIR Research Infrastructure, followed by a run through the agenda.

Then, Fotis Psomopoulos from the Institute of Applied Biosciences of the Center for Research and Technology Hellas and RDA Ambassador on Bioinformatics presented the activities performed within the Research Data Alliance (RDA), which is a global member based organisation of voluntary research on research data topics. Fotis informed about the activities of specific interest groups (IG) and working groups (WG) focusing on the biomedical sciences. Great examples are:

the FAIRsharing WG for their recommendations on how to best select and describe databases, standards and policies,
the COVID-19 WG for detailed practical guidelines on data sharing, legal issues, software development and management or community participation in the areas of clinical research, epidemiology, omics and social sciences.
the ELIXIR Bridging Force IG for serving as the bridge between ELIXIR and RDA groups, among other things, to achieve interoperability of different kinds of large-scale ("omics") data, to provide better strategies for data storage allowing for computationally intensive analyses, etc.

Moving on, Elli Papadopoulou from Athena Research Center and OpenAIRE Greek NOADs coordinator, explained that OpenAIRE assists researchers to comply with the EU mandates for Open Science. OpenAIRE is the Open Access Infrastructure for Research in Europe, which consists of a technical infrastructure and a network of information and data experts. Moreover, OpenAIRE provides a set of tools and services, such as Explore for finding interlinked research outputs, ARGOS for data management planning or Amnesia for sensitive data anonymisation. Also, it has a wide collection of information resources and supports outreach and promotion of Open Science in EU countries through a network of more than 34 NOADs. Introductory presentations ended with Alessia Bardi from CNR and OpenAIRE Research Community Dashboard product manager, who explained how OpenAIRE infrastructure is built before navigating participants in the Open Research Gateway for the ELIXIR-GR infrastructure.

Live demo: After the presentations, participants learnt how to use the Open Research Gateway, provided feedback and made suggestions for new features. Also, they got the chance to express questions regarding issues they faced when exploring the functionalities of the service. The way that the different Gateways in OpenAIRE work, is by connecting information included in the Research Graph. In OpenAIRE, researchers can upload and link their scientific results to projects, other results or research communities, including research infrastructures such as ELIXIR-GR. Also, they can perform search by ORCIDs and see the list of publications coming from a specific ORCID. It is also important to mention the ability to upload a list of DOIs as a CSV file and to perform a link to the existing list of DOIs. Overall, by using OpenAIRE Connect and the collection of Gateways, researchers are able to get in touch with Open Science best practices in the european research area.

Q&As: Some important comments were associated with the deposit feature and more specifically with the deposit in a certified repository or an open access journal. Participants were interested in learning about the connection of the dashboard with bio.tools and how they could contribute to the Research Gateway for the ELIXIR-GR infrastructure by adding tools that they develop. Among the issues discussed were the timetable according to which the Open Research Gateway will be fully operational, the automatic update of the publications' list, the size and limit per dataset for deposit. Lastly, the new features of the service were described. Examples of the new features to be integrated are content and features of the BIP!Finder tool, the automatic deposit and link to Zenodo, customization of layout and colors and re-design of the deposit page for greater customisation experience.

For more information about the agenda and supporting material, see here.

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