Following the success of our well-attended and high-profile event on open science in 2018, Young Academy of Slovenia, the association of Slovenian doctoral candidates and early career researchers, decided to continue raising awareness and education activities of this topic also in 2019. In spring, we received a grant from the FIT4RRI consortium and joined forces with the Slovenian RDA Node (coordinated by the Slovenian Social Science Data Archive), the NI4OS project (the University Library Maribor and the Academic Research Network of Slovenia), the University of Maribor and the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport to organise a two-day open science event in autumn.
The event was held on 14-15 November at the premises of the University Library Maribor. The first part of the first day was the Conference on Open Research Data in Slovenia, which enabled the coordination of infrastructural services that support research data management and an overview of current levels of access to research data in individual research fields. The conference also featured two presentations by guest speakers in English. Edit Herczog, a member of the RDA Global Council, presented the RDA and the FAIR Data Maturity Model Working Group that she is co-chairing. Sebastian Dahle, a Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Ljubljana, presented his experience in developing a research data management plan. You can read a report on the conference on the RDA website.
In the afternoon, the conference was followed by a Workshop for Researchers, which was opened by the Eurodoc Open Science ambassadors, Nejc Novak and myself. We presented the previous activities of the Young Academy of Slovenia on Open Science and the curriculum of the Eurodoc Open Science ambassadors training. Paola Masuzzo, independent researcher by IGDORE, one of the instructors of the Eurodoc training, was also a speaker at our event. She held an Introduction to Open Science followed by a session that focused on FAIR Data and Data Management Plans. The day concluded with a Presentation of the Research Data Alliance by myself as the RDA Europe Ambassador for Engineering/Renewable materials.
The workshop continued on Friday morning when the participants could choose between two parallel sessions, Open Hardware in Science (Benjamin Paffhuasen, Free University of Berlin), or Research Data Management in Human Subject Research (Irena Vipavc Brvar, Slovenian Social Science Data Archive). The afternoon continued with sessions on Open Peer Review (Edit Görögh, University of Debrecen) and Open Access Publishing (Bernarda Korez and Jerneja Grašič. University Library Maribor).
More than 80 people, mostly researchers but also librarians and other professionals, registered for the event, and almost as many came. In the evaluation questionnaire, they assessed the event very positively and expressed a wish for more trainings on these topics in the future. With all the positive responses, we therefore hope to organise a similar event in the fall of 2020.
Ana Slavec
Eurodococ Open Science Working Group Coordinator and Ambassador
Advisory board member of the Young Academy of Slovenia, the association of Slovenian doctoral students and early career researchers