How to comply with Open Science policies: services and tools to support researchers – workshop OpenAIRE-FOSTER in Spain

Article written by Eva Montenegro Piñeiro

The workshop, organised by OpenAIRE Spanish NOAD in collaboration with FOSTERPlus project took place as an associated event of “ECA – Ecosistemas del Conocimiento Abierto”, a major event in Spain for the open access and repository community, during Open Access Week.

The main focus of the workshop was to introduce to researchers and research managers European and State-level open science related policies and how to comply with them. Pilar Rico (FECYT) and Remedios Melero (CSIC) were the speakers during the first morning session. Pilar explained the open access and research data policies in H2020 and state-level mandate in Spain, whereas Remedios talked about the new strategies and policies at the EU level related to the development of open science such as the developments of the Open Science Policy Platform or the European Open Science Cloud, among others.

Hands-on sessions on tools were also provided by OpenAIRE and FOSTER+ to assist researchers and research institutions will also be part of the event, with the collaboration of João Castro (Univ. Porto). OpenAIRE infrastructure, Zenodo and other services were described by Eva Montenegro (FECYT/OpenAIRE), EUDAT services by João Castro (University of Porto) and FAIRsharing, ELIXIR tools by Remedios Melero (CSIC/FOSTERPlus).

Reme Melero at the FOSTER OpenAIRE workshop in spain

During the afternoon, participants were invited to discuss in groups about their needs and how support should be provided to them. Before the groups started their discussion, the researcher from the University of Salamanca Carlos Hernández García, open access champion who explained his experience on open access in EU funded projects in the field of Physics. Discussions were mainly related to the need of better support on open data deposit from institutions, need of training and acknowledgement of projects supporting open science, open-science integrated on the reward system for researchers, better support and mediation on open access publishing, focus not only on researchers but on other members of academia, better coordination of support services and earlier support provided by the information services during the research process.

Besides the workshop FECYT and OpenAIRE had some more room during ECA conference to talk to librarians and repository managers. Pedro Príncipe had the chance to speak about ‘Infrastructures for Open Science in Europe: the power of Repositories’ and Mª Angeles Coslado, responsible of Recolecta project in FECYT, joined a round table to describe the progress of the national open access policy Steering Committee.

Date: October, 24, 2017
Venue: University of Salamanca
Website: https://eca.usal.es/es/workshop-openaire-foster-usal
Slides: https://www.recolecta.fecyt.es/node/887