The Finnish National OpenAIRE workshop focused on infrastructures and networking for Open Science

The workshop was held at the University of Helsinki at the end of August. The event was designed to paint a broad picture of the current scene of Open Science starting from the European level down to local university level developments. The focus was clearly on infrastructures supporting the goals of Open Science but there was also a strong emphasis on networking between all participants. This aspect was facilitated by thematic discussion groups during the lunch. The workshop gathered some sixty participants, mainly from Finnish universities.

[caption id="attachment_1245" align="alignright" width="415"] Sami Niinimäki opening the workshop (Photo: Jussi Männistö)


The workshop started with opening words from Sami Niinimäki from the Ministry of Culture and Education speaking of open science and research as a science accelerator leading to surprising discoveries and creative insights. The key-note speech from Tony Ross-Hellauer presented OpenAIRE as an eInfrasctucture for Open Science. In addition to basic principles of this European research information system he highlighted some of the recent developments like open peer review and the support for the open research data pilot.

[caption id="attachment_1243" align="alignleft" width="331"] Beate Eellend commenting Tony Ross-Hellauer's presentation (Photo Jussi Männistö)


Beate Eellend from the National Library of Sweden spoke on University Open Access publishing in Sweden and presented the examples of Lund University Press and Stockholm University Press. Lund University Press cooperates with Manchester University using the OAPEN platform whereas Stockholm University Press participates in the Ubiquity Press network. The Kriterium portal offers services for review, publication dissemination of high quality academic books. It is a collaborative venture between the universities of Gothenburg, Lund and Uppsala.

In the afternoon session Heidi Laine focused on networking describing the activities of Open Knowledge Finland and its Open Science working group. There is no formal membership but the Open Science Finland Facebook group has 697 members. The Finnish committee for research data seeks to promote the principles of open data and open science in Finland. It is formed by the Council of Finnish Academies and represents a more formal type of networking in the Finnish Open Science scene.

The next two presentations drew light on recent developments at the University of Helsinki. Eero Hyvönen spoke on the Helsinki Centre for Digital Humanities (Heldig). He was recently appointed director of Heldig which is major strategic initiative of the university. Its goal is to foster the use of computational methods in humanities and social sciences, and to advance open data science. He also gave a summary of the Linked Open Data Science Service project.

Ville Tenhunen from University of Helsinki IT center presented the Mildred project that aims to upgrade the data infrastructure at the university. One of the tasks in this project is to establish data repository service while another subproject aims to connect the data management planning tool Tuuli to the university infrastructure. Joonas Kesäniemi from Helsinki University Library described ATTX which aims to become a national level platform for research related linked data. ATTX2016 project is part of the national Open Science and Research Initiative. The project implements linked open data technology in order to add value to existing research related data. It also aims to deliver robust and scalable APIs for developers.

[caption id="attachment_1246" align="alignnone" width="652"] Joonas Kesäniemi presenting ATTX-service (Photo: Jussi Männistö)


Esa-Pekka Keskitalo from the National Library of Finland spoke on TAJUA project which strives to improve tools and processes for open scholarly publishing. TAJUA is also one of the projects in Open Science and Research Initiative. One result of the project is new tool for research data metadata. The project also promotes the use of identifiers in repositories. The last presentation of the workshop was by Keijo Heljanko from Aalto University. He described the experiences from the data repository pilot that evaluated EUDAT services for data management. He made the point that from researcher perspective data management and metadata management should be tightly integrated in order to keep them synchronized.

The workshop gave a lot food for thought and definitely boosted networking among Finnish Open science actors.

The presentations and recordings from the workshop are available: http://blogs.helsinki.fi/openaire2020/2016/05/25/infrastructures-and-networking-for-open-science/

Text: Kimmo Koskinen, Helsinki University Library

Photos: Jussi Männistö, Helsinki University Library