What OpenAIRE Holds for the Future: German National Workshop at Open Access Tage

On September 15th, Germany, as an OpenAIRE partner, teamed up with the organizers of the Open Access Tage 2020 at Bielefeld University for the national workshop on OpenAIRE initiatives and the EOSC. Due to the pandemic, the Open Access Tage 2020 was transferred to the digital world under the perfect organization of the team from Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Bielefeld University Library. Speakers at the event were Ilaria Fava and Najko Jahn (University of Göttingen), Andreas Czerniak, and Jochen Schirrwagen (Bielefeld University), Lena Dreher (University of Konstanz), and Emilie Hermans (Ghent University).

The OpenAIRE session, hosted by Charlotte Meixner (Brandenburg University of Technology), included three talks: 

•  National Open Access & Open Science Initiatives by OpenAIRE (Ilaria Fava, Andreas Czerniak, Lena Dreher)https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4063915

The first presentation about National Open Access and Open Science Initiatives dealt with an introduction that helped to place OpenAIRE in the context of the EC's policy development over the years. Then it was moved to the current status of OpenAIRE in terms of support and resources to the various stakeholders – researchers, research administrators, funders, and research support staff. The OpenAIRE AMKE was mentioned, using the German community as a use case of national membership and contribution to the legal entity. Along the line of the national collaboration, there was an insightful report on the outlook of the "open-access network project" that aims to recognize a centralized discussion platform providing information on Open Access and resources available to the community.  

• OpenAIRE Research Graph
  (Andreas Czerniak, Najko Jahn)
  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4034219
  
  

  The second presentation introduced the OpenAIRE Research Graph as the core component enriched with many elements related to Open Science. The Research Graph is based on more than 10,000 trusted data sources from institutional information and specific repositories such as journals and research information systems (RIS). Moreover, national and international aggregators, such as Microsoft Academic Graph (MAG) and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) are among the data sources. That makes the OpenAIRE Research Graph a rich, curated source of high-quality standards, with more than 110 million de-duplicated publications and 7 million research data sets. Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) play a critical role in the aggregation, curation, metadata enrichment, and linking of the entities in the Research Graph. On this basis, two applications were presented that use the information contained in the graph. One is the VIPER project of Open Knowledge Maps and the other is an R package that can read and manipulate the graph dump published on ZENODO.

• How Do NFDI and EOSC Promote Cultural Change towards Open Science?
  (Jochen Schirrwagen, Andreas Czerniak, Emilie Hermans)
  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4062376
  
  The third and the final presentation was titled: 'How do NFDI and EOSC promote cultural change towards Open Science?". At this session, we discussed how initiatives at the national and European levels could combine infrastructure-driven developments with the practical implementation of Open Science principles in the daily work of researchers to create awareness of Open Access and bring cultural change. Additionally, it was presented a short introduction to the EOSC and EOSC-Pillar; a project focused on national preparedness to join the EOSC. That's an example of how EOSC and EOSC-Pillar can complement and support national initiatives in promoting cultural change so that openly shared research data that follow the FAIR principles achieve a similar status as quality-checked open access publications. The second part of the presentation focused on the National Research Data Infrastructure, which represents a German contribution to the EOSC in the context of its international networking. Using the example of consortia such as NFDI4Culture, it was explained how Open Access research results could be made available via the OpenAIRE infrastructure in the EOSC and thus be available to a global community for subsequent use.  
  
  

As usual at the Open Access Tage, all three presentations were immediately available to the public. Besides, the presentations were recorded although the preparation of the files will take some time and will be freely available on the TIB website in October.

The workshop, with approximately 174 Participants, was a good opportunity for the open-access community in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to learn more about what OpenAIRE does and holds for the future, as well as the benefits of the EOSC and OpenAIRE Research Graph being one of OpenAIRE's most important products.

Eventually, we would like to thank the IT team at Bielefeld University for their innovative organization and competent support of this new virtual format of Open Access Tage.