The European research data platform EOSC is under development, and SND is active in several areas of this collaboration. SND Senior Advisor Iris Alfredsson was recently asked to represent EOSC-Nordic in a working group that will lay the foundation for an infrastructure for training and knowledge exchange within the EOSC framework.
There is a lot going on in Europe in terms of open science and open research data. One of the major actors to drive this development is the EU-funded initiative European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). The overarching goal of EOSC is to create a global platform that will make all types or research data accessible to researchers and other stakeholders around the world. The platform will also collect services for processing, analysing, and storing data, as well as resources in data-related training.
Since 2019, SND has been one of the organisations that represent Sweden in the regional project EOSC-Nordic, which strives to coordinate research infrastructures in the Nordic and Baltic countries. Iris Alfredsson, Senior Advisor in SND, is part of the project and will now be representing EOSC-Nordic in the larger EOSC working group for training.
—I was asked if I wanted to represent EOSC-Nordic in the Skills & Training working group. I feel very happy about that. These are exciting questions that I’ve have a personal interest in for a long time, and thought a lot about.
The working group will coordinate training resources
EOSC has six main working groups, which focus on different development areas: Landscape, FAIR, Architecture, Rules of participation, Skills & Training, and Sustainability. The latest group to be appointed is Skills & Training, and Iris Alfredsson explains that the work they do at the moment is a form of inventory phase.
—In the beginning, much of the work has been to define which target groups and stakeholders that are part of these contexts. EOSC is aimed at researchers, research support, and decision-makers, but also at a wider public.
The Skills & Training EOSC group has been given the mission to create a framework for training and knowledge exchange that will support the development of EOSC, but still be able to operate in the future when all parts of the research data platform are in place. The work in the group mainly involves making use of existing resources in the organisations and initiatives that are connected to EOSC today, and to develop a system for how to implement them on an institutional, national, and European level.
—Within EOSC, there are many infrastructures in various disciplines that are coordinated, and they contain valuable knowledge and training resources that the working group will be coordinating. But our work is also connected to actual training and professionalising of research support functions. Personally, I think it’s important that you get good training in order to be able to work with research data support.
The work in the Skills & Training working group lasts throughout 2020. You can read more about the work and objectives of the working group here.
