Italian OpenAIRE national workshop 2016

a post by Paola Gargiulo, NOAD for Italy

On May 30th and May 31^st, the National Open Access Desk for Italy, Cineca organized is national workshop on Open Science in collaboration with CNR, FOSTER project and the universities of Bologna, Parma, Turin and Trento and with the patronage of APRE, the Italian NCP, and AISA, the Italian Association for the Promotion of Open Science.

The main goal of the two-day workshop was to focus primarily on Open Science in the Italian context, discuss on what it has been achieved so far, what is needed, which are the obstacles and the future prospects. The objective was to provide information, practical tools to accelerate the implementation of an Open Science culture in Italy.

The first day was devoted to policy issues, infrastructures and tools to implement the principles of Open Access and Open Science, whereas the second day focused on open research data and the cultural, legal, infrastructural, technical issues related to sharing research data.

On May 30^th the workshop entitled “OpenAIRE, a platform to support Open Science in Europe” gave the attendees the opportunity to have a clear picture and detailed information on OA policies, guidelines and resource materials as well as an update on infrastructure, tools and services made available by OpenAIRE.

Horizon 2020 OA policy and the ORD Pilot were illustrated respectively by the NOAD for Italy and by Marjan Grootveld from Dans; the implementation of institutional OA policies in Italian universities was presented by Roberto Delle Donne, coordinator of CRUI (Conference of Rectors of Italian Universities) OA Working Group. To broaden the context and also to share the results and tools of other related and relevant EU funded projects, Antonio Vetrò, from the Nexa Center for Internet & Societ, Polytechnics of Turin, presented the Pasteur4OA project on the alignment OA policies. Marina Angelaki, NOAD for Greece presented the main outputs of the RECODE Project: a set of policy recommendations for facilitating open access to research data. While Jose Carvalho, from the University of Minho, presented some activities from the FOSTER project, aimed at training young researchers in Open Science.

A full session was devoted to the OpenAIRE platform, Paolo Manghi provided a detailed description on how OpenAIRE is supporting Open Science and what are the technological developments in the pipeline to tackle some new challenges arising from open science. Federico Ferrario from Cineca illustrated the activities carried out to make over 60 Italian installations of IRIS (the Italian research information system) compliant to OpenAIRE guidelines and touched upon the future developments to better integrate the Italian scholarly research output and funding with OpenAIRE.

The late morning was devoted to DMP management, Marjan Grootveld went into the details of writing a DMP, provided tips and caveats and also assigned a short practical exercise which was done by the participants in small groups and discussed afterwards in the plenary sessions in the early afternoon.

The first day ended with a talk on the role and the competence of a data curator based on a study conducted by IFLA and presented by Anna Maria Tammaro, Chair IFLA Library Theory and Research Section and with a detailed description of a data pilot in practice, the experience carried out by the University of Bologna supporting a research group in writing a DMP within the ORD Pilot framework.

The second day focused on the role of open data in the context of open science. The workshop entitled “Open research data and Open Science” featured national and international speakers who addressed the cultural, legal, infrastructural issues related to sharing research data in the morning; in the afternoon different research communities shared their experiences in managing data.

Roberto Caso from the University of Trento and President of AISA- The Association for the Promotion of Open Science, stressed the values of the Open Science such as democracy, transparency, equity, cooperation, and moral integrity, he remarked on the need of educating a new generation of scientists by teaching them the values and practices of Open Science. Furthermore, he urged a reform in the current Italian evaluation system and in the copyright law.  On the latter topic Julia Reda, MEP illustrated the state of the art of the European Copyright Reform focusing on Text and Data Mining (TDM) and the current Consultation on Ancillary Rights.

The second sessions featured two researchers/ university professors who are actively engaged in Open Science. Barend Mons, chair of the Commission High-Level Expert Group European Science Cloud Initiative (EOSC) presented the EOSC and he remarked upon the importance of going beyond open access to publications, his opinions were reinforced by Björn Brembs, from the University of Regensburg who is convincingly practising open science and blogging on it. His presentation focused on the need of new infrastructures and technologies to fulfil the current needs of researchers doing Open Science. He suggested that cost of those developments could be covered by the budgets currently dedicated to paying for journal subscriptions.

The morning ended with Paolo Budroni, from the University of Vienna, showed the survey developed in Austria about how researchers deal with the data. This survey was conducted in the framework of the Austrian E-infrastructures Project. Ignasi Labastida, from the University of Barcelona, presented the LEARN project showing the main goals but also the first outcomes of the two workshops already held in London and Vienna, and the first results of the survey on the readiness to manage research data

The workshop closed in the afternoon with a session devoted to Italian experiences from universities and research institutions working with research data from several disciplines.

Both workshops were attended by over 90 people, and more or less the same number of people followed the event on live streaming. During the first day, the attendees were mainly from University and Research Centres research offices, IT teams and from libraries which are giving support in implementing Open Science, whereas the second day featured a higher presence of researchers themselves and research offices.

The Q/A sessions were quite lively confirming a strong interest and growing engagement of the different communities, researchers, research administrators, IT staff and librarians in implementing Open Science. Some private research funders also attended the event.

The two days demonstrated the Open Science is making progress in Italy in spite the lack of a national strategic vision, there are many projects and activities going on at research and e- infrastructure level, some research communities have achieved a discrete competence and expertise on data management and curation. Horizon 2020 as well as OpenAIRE are greatly contributing to the implementation of Open Science in Italy

 
Abstracts, presentations and audio- video recordings are available: http://www.oa.unito.it/new/openaire-an-open-science-tool-for-europe/ (May 30^th)

http://www.oa.unito.it/new/open-research-data-and-open-science/  (May 31^st)
Other reports on the workshops:

“Open” significa innovazione: il Convegno Nazionale OpenAire a Roma, Anna Maria Tammaro (in Italian)

The Italian OpenAIRE National Workshop: The LEARN Project in Rome, Ignasi La Bastida (in English)