Report FOSTER training: ‘’Promoting Open Science among Young Researchers: Challenges and Opportunities‘’

[guest post by Rasa Dovidonyte] 

On March 19, 2015, the first seminar in the FOSTER-supported training programme Promoting Open Science among young researchers: Challenges and Opportunities, took place. The topics discussed were: "EU and national open access and open science policies and practices, in relation to publicly funded research in Horizon 2020 and national grant schemes" and "Linking Open Access research publications with Open research data".

The workshop was organized by  Kaunas University of Technology , in cooperation with the Research Council of Lithuania, Lithuanian Research Library Consortium, Mykolas Romeris University, the Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers,  and the EU projects OpenAIRE2020 and PASTEUR4OA.

Two guest speakers were invited to the event: Dr Brigita Serafinavičiūtė, member of the Research Council of Lithuania and coordinator of PASTEUR4OA, and Martin Donnelly – Senior Institutional Support Officer at the Digital Curation Centre, University of Edinburgh. Dr Leonas Balaševičius, Director of the Department of Research Affairs at Kaunas University of Technology, opened the seminar by pointing out that the issues of OA are of particular relevance for Lithuania at present as open access centres are being established. He said that FOSTER seminars give an excellent opportunity for a discussion and provoked the audience to come up with sharp questions. The moderator of the event was Dr Gintarė Tautkevičienė, Library Director of KTU and the coordinator of FOSTER seminars in Lithuania and the national coordinator of OpenAIRE 2020.

Dr Brigita Serafinavičiūtė during her presentation ''Open Access- Contemporary Trend in Science" discussed the concept of Open Access. She reviewed the development of Open Access movement and its benefits for researchers and the wider society. The situation of OA policy implementation in Lithuania was presented, the concepts of "Green" and "Gold" open access roads were discussed. Brigita also discussed the OA situation in the word and compared the FP7 and Horizon2020 programmes in relation to OA. The audience got acquainted with the responsibilities of the Research Council of Lithuania regarding OA policy implementation and current situation of open access repositories.

In the second presentation "Linking Open Access Research Publications with Open Research Data" Martin Donnelly presented Digital Curation Center its mission, activities, resources and outcomes of international collaboration with partners. Martin Donnelly presented development of open access and open data, emphasised the importance of linking data to publications as an active approach to research data management, presented the DataOne lifecycle model. Transparency, efficiency, accessibility and preservation were highlighted as benefits of data sharing and publication. There was a live webcast of the seminar; as a result of video conferencing between Kaunas University of Technology and Mykolas Romeris University in Vilnius, the audience in Vilnius was able to join the discussion after the presentations.

If you want more information about upcoming events in this series, please take a look on the FOSTER event page: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/event/promoting-open-science-among-young-researchers-challenges-and-opportunities-4-workshops. Updates will be posted there, as well as presentations and videoclips of past events. 

For more information, you can also contact Rasa Dovidonyte (KTU) rasa.dovidonyte[at]ktu.lt