On 10-11-12 March, the OSCARS Consortium, its funded projects and Science Cluster representatives got together in Seville, Spain, for an engaging three-day meeting focused on networking, structural and strategic planning and showcasing the tangible impact of the community’s research. The Consortium had the pleasure to have 96 participants in person and about 20 people joining online.
Giovanni Lamanna (CNRS) (ESCAPE) - OSCARS Project Coordinator
Two years into the OSCARS project, with 70 funded projects up and running, furthering excellence in Open Science, this 2nd OSCARS Annual General meeting had the objective of encouraging thought provoking conversations around shared challenges and building synergies in the Open Science community. Moving beyond just traditional reporting, the event’s many collaborative sessions fostered deeper cooperation between the Science Cluster - ENVRI, LSRI, SSHOC, PaNOSC, ESCAPE - and the OSCARS Funded Projects.
Other key concepts behind the event were:
- Consolidating and standardising the position of Community based Competence Centres
- Identifying ways of, tailoring mentoring and support for Funded Projects to ensure results’ long term sustainability;
- Community Building oriented to the integration of OSCARS Funded Projects into the EOSC ecosystem.
OSCARS Project Coordinator Giovanni Lamanna and project Work Package (WP) leaders kicked off the event introducing where OSCARS stands in driving the uptake of FAIR-data-intensive research across Europe. Covering 5 different thematic areas in Open Science across four data related challenges, fostering Open Science in 28 countries and more than 200 organisations, the project is creating strong ties across Science Clusters within the Open Science ecosystem.
The WPs then moved to three rounds of discussions, working to align technical roadmaps with the real-world needs of the scientific community, ensuring that OSCARS activities remain synced with the wider EOSC landscape.
The second day of the event was dedicated to the tangible results achieved by the Open science funded projects and their plan for long term sustainability. 70 flash talks divided not by thematic area, but by challenge:
- The harmonisation of Digital Repositories into interoperable, FAIR-aligned infrastructures that ensure long-term data discoverability;
- The advancement of Data Annotation through semantic links and community-validated metadata standards;
- The development of Software, AI, and Composable Tools that support the entire research lifecycle from generation to archiving;
- Promoting Open Science and providing training for scientific communities
Clustering by challenge allowed the projects to identify commonalities and share best practices across the data lifecycle
The participants explored synergies between projects through dedicated poster sessions setting up the stage for the last part of the event.
Attendes at the OSCARS poster session
Interactive Data Lifecycle visual
On the third and last day of the 2nd OSCARS AGM, the funded projects representatives ran mentoring sessions with the Clusters’ Open Science Competence Centres (CLOCCs), EOSC nodes and hubs, identifying the service and training offering vs the needs of funded projects with the aim to ensure that Open Science resources are easily accessible and interoperable across the wider EOSC ecosystem.
We closed the event with renewed intent to bridge the remaining gaps in European Open Science, ensuring that the tools and collaborations developed here drive scientific progress and cross-border innovation across disciplines for years to come.
We would like to extend our sincere gratitude to LifeWatch ERIC in Sevilla, the Science Clusters for their valuable contributions and the Open Science Funded Projects representatives too for their commitment in building excellence in Open Science that furthers a collective, amplified impact across the research landscape. This 2nd AGM is a decisive milestone in consolidating the OSCARS legacy and we look forward to reporting more on the project’s achievements as the funded projects’ showcase their final results.
