Building bridges across Open Science in the UK: The RDA UK/OpenAIRE Advance Joint Workshop

On the 6^th of May, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) UK node and OpenAIRE Advance offered a joint workshop focusing on our efforts with open access/open science initiatives and the underlying importance of research data. This was the 3^rd workshop that the RDA UK has offered and the final workshop for the UK's national open access desk, or NOAD, as part of the project, which concludes at the end of this year. Speakers included Christopher Brown, Jennifer Sanchez-Davies, and me from Jisc; Juan Bicarregui from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC); Venkataraman Shanmugasundaram from the Digital Curation Centre (DCC); René van Horik and Ingrid Dillo from the Data Archiving and Networked Services in The Netherlands (DANS); Hilary Hanahoe from the RDA; and Rachel Bruce from UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

The event, which we had hoped would be a physical conference but was adapted to a virtual workshop because of the pandemic, was a chance to find out about relevant activities in open science, in particular in the areas of training, FAIR data, and certification.

The aim was to connect researchers, open science facilitators, research facilitators, repository managers, policymakers, funders and librarians with a strong focus on the FAIR principles: Findable-Accessible-Interoperable-Reusable.