Representatives of several ministries, funding bodies, research institutions from eight European countries and of two international publishers attended the 2nd LEARN workshop at the Campus of the University of Vienna, organised by LEARN partner UNIVIE with the help of the consortium members.
The workshop, focused on Research Data Management towards Open Science, was designed to encourage all stakeholders – researchers, research funders, research organisations and senior decision makers – to explore what their roles and responsibilities are in the fast-changing environment of infrastructure development and research data management.
These topics were driven by four excellent keynotes in the morning session.
Paul Ayris first addressed the growing importance of research data and research data management (RDM) in the research lifecycle, the relevance of the LERU Roadmap for Research Data in the research landscape, policy development and alignment within the European Open Science Cloud.
The development of policies is closely related to a precise identification of subset of data use. The working group of the Research Data Alliance (RDA) on data citation represented by Andreas Rauber elaborated recommendations on enabling precise identification and citability of dynamic data. In his talk Rauber reviewed the identified challenges and discussed possible solutions.
Gerhard Budin demonstrated in his keynote a use case on a large Austrian project in the field of Digital Humanities and linguistic research showing how policies should contemplate cross-disciplinary methodologies and derived challenges on the one hand, and, on the other, the federated research e-infrastructure including language technology and machine translation research environment.
The growing engagement of publishers in the field of research data management was illustrated by Catriona MacCallum. She focused on open access issues with liberal re-use rights to the research literature, embracing the validity of negative or inconclusive data. The promotion of transparent reporting remains a key editorial strategy in order to increase the availability of underlying data associated to papers.
At the afternoon session, attendees shared their experiences in three parallel Round Tables (RT). Each RT was chaired by two LEARN project partners (one moderator, one rapporteur) and was assigned to a dedicated topic. The focus of the discussions was on the roles and competencies of acting entities, the role of policies concerning research data and questions about re-use: “How might setting policies ensure research data can be shared and be re-usable?“.
After the presentation by the rapporteurs of the main outcomes (containing common position statements) of the round table discussions, LEARN project coordinator Paul Ayris shared his outlook on further project developments in his closing remarks. Finally, workshop organiser Paolo Budroni invited the participants to the 3rd LEARN Workshop on Research Data Management – “Make research data management policies work” – organized by LIBER and to be held in Helsinki on 28th June 2016.
The programme, presentations and videos of the event are available at: https://learn-rdm.eu/workshops/2nd-workshop.