Danish OpenAIRE national workshop on challenges and possibilities for Open Science

On the November 16^th 2016 a national workshop was held in Odense, Denmark at the University of Southern Denmark. The workshop opened with the perspective of recent developments in the area of data management in Europe in general and Denmark in particular with focus on Horizon 2020.

One of the main developments in Denmark recently is the forming of the National Forum for Research Data Management with participants from all 8 Danish universities, The Royal Library, The State Library and the National Archives. Following the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity from 2014 the Danish universities have begun a process of developing policies on data management, and the forum has this aspect as well as train-the-trainer and online guidance of researchers on the agenda. Head of the forum Henrik Pedersen gave a fine presentation of the work being done and what is in the pipeline.

[caption id="attachment_1579" align="aligncenter" width="487"] Henrik Pedersen, SDU (Photo: Asger V. Larsen)


Next Pablo de Castro gave a very interesting presentation of the FP7 Post-Grant Open Access Pilot. Interesting also because Denmark has improved her performance measured by approved funding requests – we are now ahead of Norway J Pablo could also report that the average APC has not had the dramatic increase towards the €2000 cap, but is rather rising from €1350 to €1450 the past year. Let’s see where it ends.

[caption id="attachment_1580" align="aligncenter" width="506"] Pablo de Castro, LIBER (Photo: Asger V. Larsen)


Marjan Grootveld continued online from Holland with a walk-through of the Open Data Pilot, with focus on how to write a data management plan according to the FAIR-principles. These were explained in detail with all the peculiarities included. The “a” in FAIR means accessibility – not necessarily meaning open access.  Following the FAIR principles it should be clear though under which conditions one can get access, or why one cannot and the metadata should be available and retrievable through an open protocol.

[caption id="attachment_1581" align="aligncenter" width="508"] Hanne Marie Motzfeld, SDU (Photo: Asger V. Larsen)


Next up was Pedro Principe from University of Minho who told us about OpenAIRE as an information broker e.g. between CRIS systems. The workshop ended with a fast tour through the challenges of sharing sensitive data and the rationale behind the restrictions imposed on the free movement of data or as Hanne Marie Motzfeld (Assistant Professor, Department of Law, SDU) and Bassah Khalaf (Assistant Professor, Department of Law, SDU) called it: the digital single market. Data can be misused and to prevent this, restrictions have been set up in order to protect research subjects (and people who are subject to data collection for other purposes). Not all data are meant for publication and in order to preserve the public trust in researchers that is common at least in Denmark, researchers must be careful to protect their sensitive data

The last presentation was done by Diba Marcus from the Danish e-Infrastructure Collaboration (DeIC) and the subject was a brand new infrastructure for data storage called data.deic.dk. It is free of charge for researchers (for now) and is run as a national service. It is meant to have some of the qualities of other popular cloud based storage and sharing services, but in addition be legal to use for sensitive data. The technology behind it is Open Cloud – but the next iteration will be built on Next Cloud (new organization – same programmers).

The conference was very interesting thanks to the highly skilled and experienced presenters, and we hope that it contributed to the awareness of the challenges but also the possibilities of opening research.