Facilitate Open Science Training for European Research 
Scottish Graduate School of Social Science Workshop: 
Good practice in data management & data sharing with social research  
 
Edinburgh, 10 June, 2015 
 
Robin Rice  
EDINA and Data Library 
University of Edinburgh 
 
 
Introduction to Workshop 
 About EDINA and Data Library at the University of 
Edinburgh 
 Open Science, Open Scholarship 
 Open Social Science 
 FOSTER EU Project (Facilitate Open Science Training for 
European Research) 
 Hashtag #fosteropenscience 
 FOSTER Training Portal: https://www.fosteropenscience.eu/ 
 
 
Edinburgh University Data Library 
 Data Library established in 1983 to provide Population 
Census and other datasets for analysis; EDINA in 1995-6 
 Support for secondary analysis of existing datasets 
 We help users with queries like 
 Does such data even exist? 
 Where can I locate it? 
 Who will pay for it? 
 How can I access it? 
 What does this documentation mean? 
 How do I use it in X software? 
 Involved in use of data for learning and teaching, 
helping researchers manage their own data better 
Open Science, Open Scholarship 
 
Principle: Publicly-funded Research is a Public Good 
• Open Access – Gold & Green OA, institutional repositories 
• Open Data – Data as a First Class Research Object 
• Open Source Software, GNU GPL 1980s, copyleft 
• Creative Commons Licences, Open Knowledge 
• Code + Data Sharing  Reproducible Research 
• Web 2.0  Science 2.0  
• Crowd-sourcing, Crowd-funding, Citizen Science 
 
 
(What are Creative Commons licenses?) 
For more information about the Creative Commons license: 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/?lang=en 
 
Open Social Science 
• Long tradition of sharing data in social sciences 
• Collection of social data expensive and time-consuming, 
data products (esp. surveys) rich for re-use 
• Data and program libraries sprung up in research 
universities after mainframe computing introduced 
• ESRC has funded UK Data Archive at Essex University 
since 1967; part of Council of European Social Science 
Data Archives (CESSDA) 
• ESRC in 2000s successfully argued for more £ based on 
‘data as infrastructure’ 
• New data forms - linked admin records, big (social media 
and transactional) data –requiring new services 
 
 
Foster Project Objectives 
• To support different stakeholders, especially younger researchers, in 
adopting open access in the context of the European Research Area 
(ERA) and in complying with the open access policies and rules of 
participation set out for Horizon 2020 
• To integrate open access principles and practice in the current 
research workflow by targeting the young researcher training 
environment 
• To strengthen institutional training capacity to foster compliance 
with the open access policies of the European Research Area and 
Horizon 2020 (beyond the FOSTER project) 
• To facilitate the adoption, reinforcement and implementation of 
open access policies from other European funders, in line with the 
EC’s recommendation, and to support the H2020 Open Data Pilot