Together with five other European research infrastructures, SND has been appointed as a national Competence Centre within Skills4EOSC. The idea behind these centres is to serve as nodes for national and European collaborations on open science and research data, something that fits very well into SND's network model.
Iris Alfredsson, Senior Advisor, and William Gothlin Illsley, Research Data Advisor, are responsible for SND's activities within Skills4EOSC, a comprehensive European collaboration to support and harmonize training in research data management for researchers. They are both pleased to see that the national collaboration within the SND network can inspire similar initiatives in other European countries.
A robust Swedish network model
“We have a very robust model with our network, where we gather Sweden's expertise and knowledge of where to find it. The idea of this project within Skills4EOSC is to build Competence Centres in ten countries. These will then serve as national nodes for coordinating the work on open science,” says Iris Alfredsson.
Currently, Skills4EOSC has five Competence Centres in addition to SND:
- Italian Computing and Data Infrastructure (ICDI)
- Open Science Cloud Competence Center in Greece
- The CSC Research Data Management Competence Center (Finland)
- Open Science and Research Data Competence Centre OSC@MK (North Macedonia)
- Recherche Data Gouv (France)
Some of the key tasks of the Competence Centres include curriculum development; quality assurance and certification of skills and training materials; professional networks and user support networks; and Training of Trainers programmes. The centres will also be important for defining competency profiles for various professions within open science, and for developing FAIR-by-design methods for various types of training materials.
An official launch of the Competence Centres initiative will take place virtually in the summer. The first physical meeting between the Competence Centres will occur at the EOSC Symposium in Berlin in October. The idea is for the national nodes and the collaboration between them to continue even after the Skills4EOSC project has concluded in 1.5 years.
Training of Master Trainers
Another initiative within Skills4EOSC, which is connected to the mission as a Competence Centre, is the training of so-called ‘Master Trainers’ in various research areas. The purpose of training Master Trainers and creating common training materials is to achieve as much national and European uniformity as possible regarding research data management.
“It's good that we can collaborate on training instead of creating a lot of different things across Europe. The idea within Skills4EOSC is that we continue working on ‘FAIR by design’ in an accessible way. Currently, for example, there is a pilot project underway in the social sciences and humanities, and more initiatives are to come,” says William Gothlin Illsley.