Celebrating FOSTER's first year and looking ahead to 2015

An exciting year of FOSTER activities is about to end. To celebrate this and to get a fresh start for the second year, all of the 13 consortium partners gathered in Göttingen in mid-January. A range of presentations showed the impressive progress the project has made. In several interactive sessions we discussed and planned the year ahead.

All partners were satisfied with the high recognition and visibility of the FOSTER "brand" through social networks as well as participation in and presentation at events and conferences. In particular the level of engagement with the community visible through the replies to our calls for training and content was honoured.

Highlight of 2014 was certainly the co-funding of over 70 FOSTER training events on open access, open data and open science in 13 European Research Area countries in diverse formats attended by over 1700 researchers, students, project managers, research administrators, librarians and policy makers.

The wide scope and reach of the programme will now enable broad re-use of the training material uploaded and presented in the FOSTER Training Portal. The Open Science Taxonomy helps navigating through the wealth of content. Open University and TU Delft presented the current status and development of what will form the base of project activity in 2015: completion and demonstration of re-use of the collected training material.

EIFL led the discussion on possible topics for the blended and self-learning courses that will be offered later this year and be delivered through the newly added eLearning capabilities of the FOSTER Portal.

For each of our target groups, learning objectives are in preparation to complement our training toolkit.

We would like to hear your ideas on the most important open access, open research data and open science topics we should cover (check out our topics map at http://www.fosteropenscience.eu).

Furthermore we agreed that strenghtening our contacts to build a pipeline of liaison partners will be on top of our agenda for 2015.

Stay tuned for the forthcoming traing calender 2015 or get in touch if you are interested in collaboration.