Open Science FAIR 2023

Open Science Fair 2023

Madrid, Spain, 25–27 September 2023.

CHARTING THE COURSE: REIMAGINING OPEN SCIENCE FOR NEXT GENERATIONS – The Open Science FAIR 2023

Open Science FAIR 2023 – the emblematic initiative of OpenAIRE – returns to its in-person format from 25–27 September in Madrid, Spain. This year the event will be co-organised with OpenAIRE’s Spanish NOAD, the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as key European projects and global initiatives.

The fourth edition of the OS FAIR aims at reflecting on the future of Open Science, what lies ahead and how we can work together, pave the way and focus on charting the future of Open Science for future generations. The conference will bring together different communities and experiences from around the world to identify synergies, share good practices and develop collaborative interfaces. An exciting programme with dynamic sessions will be put together and it will include keynote speeches by distinguished speakers, roundtable discussions, workshops and training sessions, as well as demo sessions. OS FAIR will bring together perspectives from different actors and will suggest ways on how communities can work together to produce roadmaps for the implementation of Open Science.

The OS FAIR welcomes all actors of the research communities and infrastructures, including: librarians, repository managers, content providers, service providers, research administrators, facilitators of research, learned societies, publishers, policy makers and funders, citizen science groups and initiatives, and innovators in scholarly communication.

The FAIR-IMPACT project will feature at the Open Science FAIR 2023.

EOSC Symposium 2023

EOSC Symposium 2023

Madrid, Spain, 20–22 September 2023.

The EOSC Symposium 2023 will take place in Madrid in the context of the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the European Union. The event is organised by EOSC Future together with the EOSC Tripartite collaboration (the EOSC Association, the EOSC Steering Board and the European Commission).

Last year’s event, which took place in Prague on 14–17 November 2022, marked the EOSC Symposium’s return as an in-person event with over 400 participants. This year, the event will be fully hybrid, facilitating broader exchanges – in person and online – between stakeholders from ministries, policy makers, research organisations, service providers, research e-infrastructures and research communities across Europe and beyond.

You can get a glimpse of EOSC Symposium 2022 in the event recap video here.

EOSC Symposium 2023 will offer plenty of opportunities to engage with the community. A call for application will open soon at #EOSCsymposium23 website.

Stay tuned for programme and event updates soon!

SIGN UP TO THE PRE-REGISTRATION

EOSC Symposium 2023: Context

The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) is an EU flagship initiative aimed at enabling Open Science practices in Europe, as codified in the 2022-2024 European Research Area Policy Agenda. It is also recognised as the science, research and innovation data space which will be fully articulated with the other sectoral data spaces defined in the European strategy for data.

EOSC will provide a federated web of FAIR data and associated services to researchers across and outside Europe. EOSC builds on existing infrastructure and services supported by the EC, Member States and research communities. It brings these together in a federated ‘system of systems’ approach, adding value by aggregating content and enabling services to be used together.

Celebrating and calibrating Mediterranean forests

Mediterranean forests

The Mediterranean basin is the third-richest hotspot in the world in terms of plant biodiversity  and one of the greatest sources of endemic plants on Earth. Its plant diversity accounts for 25,000 plant species, 60% of which are endemic, of which more than 100 tree species are recorded in Mediterranean forests. It is estimated that the region has more than 25 million hectares of Mediterranean forests and about 50 million hectares of other Mediterranean wooded lands. The knowledge on Mediterranean forests is, however, fragmented.

To celebrate the importance of Mediterranean forest knowledge, ETC-UMA is pleased to announce the international workshop to take place in Malaga, Spain on 2 June 2023 addressing current policy, technologies and practices on Mediterranean forest data entitled “A knowledge baseline on Mediterranean forests supported by innovation”.

Co-organised by the European Environment Agency (EEA) and the European Topic Centre on Spatial Analysis and Synthesis of the University of Malaga (ETC-UMA) in the frame of the ERDF-funded project EnBiC2-Lab for an Environmental and Biodiversity Climate Change Lab, this event on Mediterranean Forests and innovation aims to bring together a community of EU and Mediterranean key players to address the status of regional political and research agendas in support of forests.

The regional efforts of European projects in paving the way towards raising awareness and providing tools and solutions to consider in the post-2020 plans in the Mediterranean region will be part of the debate to ensure better protection and management of these sensitive key ecosystems, including a look into financing instruments needed for their future long-term sustainable restoration and conservation.

Check out some of the latest knowledge generated by ETC-UMA colleagues on forest types and maps:

We would be happy to welcome you to Malaga on 2 June 2023. If you are interested in attending the international workshop, please contact Virginia García.

Bioinformatics Education Summit

Bioinformatics Education Summit

UK, 15–17 May 2023.

The Bioinformatics education summit provides a platform for discussion, development and dissemination of advances, guidance and best practice for training and education in bioinformatics as part of a global network.

Held as a working meeting (rather than a conference or workshop), its goal is to promote the advancement of training and education through the development of resources, best practices and guidance for delivery, all of which are made openly available to the global community through its partner networks.

The first summit was held in Cape Town in 2019 under the auspices of H3ABioNet, with subsequent summits held virtually, hosted by different organisations with a key interest in training and education (EMBL-EBI, CABANA and APBionet). Outputs from previous summits have included a training guidance and resources portal (hosted by GOBLET); the third evolution of the ISCB bioinformatics competency framework and guidance on its implementation; best practices and resources for the delivery of bioinformatics training in LMICs; guidance and recommendations for virtual and hybrid course delivery; and a globally available virtual Train-the-Trainer course.


This year’s meeting will offer both in-person and virtual attendance and will focus on three main themes:

  • Furthering the use and adoption of the ISCB competency framework through extending the framework itself to include health data science roles and developing further practical support for people to use it in developing training.
  • Exploring how we can make our training and teaching more green, including improving compute practices for environmental sustainability
  • Developing and sharing best practice for building and supporting communities of best practice in training.

There will also be opportunity to further review challenges and opportunities for developing and delivering training to participants in low resource settings, as well as participating in initiatives focused on ensuring that training materials are FAIR, train-the-trainer activities, and much more.

If you are involved in the design and delivery of bioinformatics training and education and would like to spend 3 days working with a global community of trainers and educators to develop guidance and practice with impact on a global scale, then please join us!

Travel bursaries are made possible through RItrainPlus, a co-organiser of the Education Summit. The RItrainPlus project received funding from European Union’s H2020 programme under grant agreement no.101008503, and LifeWatch ERIC is a partner.

More information is available here.

AZTI SUMMER SCHOOL 2023 ‘Innovative and practical tools for monitoring and assessing multiple human pressures affecting biodiversity in marine systems’

AZTI Summer School

San Sebastian, Spain, 5–7 June 2023.

In this edition of the AZTI Summer School, the topic proposed is “Innovative and practical tools for monitoring and assessing multiple human pressures affecting biodiversity in marine systems“. This year, the school is organised in the framework of several Horizon Europe projects:  GES4SEAS, OBAMA-NEXT, BiOcean5D, ACTNOW and MARBEFES). LifeWatch ERIC is a partner in the latter.

The main objective of the AZTI Summer School is to present the innovative tools that are already practically used in monitoring the ocean, and the tools used to assess the cumulative effects of multiple pressures, as well as the status of the ocean and the ecosystem services it provides.

WHEN: 5, 6 and 7 June 2023
WHERE: Aquarium of San Sebastian (Spain)
LANGUAGE: English
PROGRAMME: HERE
SPEAKERS INFO: HERE
REGISTER: HERE

Early registration fee: 90,00 € (VAT included). Deadline: 20 April
Standard registration fee: 115,00 € (VAT included). From 21 April to 2 June

OntoCommons Workshop

Hybrid, 4–6 April 2023.

The ambition to facilitate data sharing and interoperability within the Materials and Manufacturing domains is the core motivation for this event. Stemming from the OntoCommons H2020 project activities, this focused workshop provides a platform for academic researchers and industrial practitioners to meet and discuss about the Materials and Manufacturing Commons* key enablers, in particular, Digital Marketplaces, FAIR Principles and Ontologies. In this workshop, the Digital Marketplaces concept and its current status of implementation will be shown in order to continue the discussion about requirements and challenges using ontologies. Tools supporting data documentation and interoperability will be showcased, and concrete challenges, success stories, as well as experiences using ontologies will be shared. A session and panel discussion on the future developments of Materials and Manufacturing Commons with focus on materials and manufacturing data spaces will round up the first part of the workshop. In the second part, the FAIR principles will be introduced and existing tools and guidelines to leverage the FAIR principles in industrial context will be identified and discussed together with experts and participants. The third day of the workshop will be dedicated to participants’ input, feedback and questions, including an open pitch session for participants. Demos of the tools provided by the ontology commons ecosystem, a virtual tour of digital marketplaces and hands-on working sessions for enhancing the FAIRness score of participants’ own ontologies will provide a tangible take-away result from the workshop. To deepen and consolidate the communication and networking between OntoCommons, the digital marketplaces, FAIR initiatives and interested users of semantic tools, this workshop is open (no registration fee) and will take place on-site at the Fraunhofer Forum Berlin (Germany).

The FAIR-IMPACT project will be showcased in Session 3: FAIR Resources for Industry.

Registration and programme information can be found on the OntoCommons website.

Why Mappings Matter and how to make them FAIR – A FAIR-IMPACT Workshop

FAIR Impact Mapping Workshop

Online, 13 April 2023.

Semantic artefacts  – a broader term to include ontologies, terminologies, taxonomies, thesauri, vocabularies, metadata schemas and standards – are key to achieving data interoperability and are therefore essential to the implementation of the FAIR principles. With the growing number of semantic artefacts and their diversified uses, interconnecting these artefacts becomes critical but also more challenging. To achieve interoperability and integration, one solution is to identify/generate mappings/crosswalks between different artefacts of the same domain or used to represent the same type of information. This process, known in the semantic web domain as ontology matching or ontology alignment, should be applied to the whole spectrum of semantic artefacts.

As any other type of data, we need a strategy to deal with mappings and ensure mappings are made available following the FAIR principles in relevant mapping repositories where they can be curated, integrated and rendered for reuse. Recent initiatives like the SEMAF study or the SSSOM format or the activities within the FAIR-IMPACT and FAIRCORE4EOSC projects have highlighted the needs of communities to find, access and reuse mappings and crosswalks in a machine actionable format which is not currently addressed. 

FAIR-IMPACT is starting a series of workshops to discuss issues around mappings and crosswalks and how they can become shareable and reusable, i.e. FAIR, elevating them to “first class” citizens in the FAIR data world.

The first one will take place on Thursday 13 Apr at 14:00 – 18:00 CEST.

Registration and agenda information can be found on the FAIR-IMPACT website.

Goal of the event

The 1st FAIR-IMPACT workshop of the series, ‘Why Mappings Matter and how to make them FAIR?’, will introduce participants to the motivation behind doing mappings and how they could benefit even more by making mappings FAIR. Then a series of Show and Tell presentations will take place, where use cases and practices from a range of communities –spanning domains, research infrastructures, projects, task forces, and working groups– will be presented. During this workshop, FAIR-IMPACT will also introduce The Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) as a candidate format for defining and sharing entity mappings, considering also its pivotal role in the FAIRCORE4EOSC technical specifications.

The presentations will be followed by a collaborative work on mapping aspects, including methodologies, formats, tools, requirements for FAIR mappings and examples.

The main objective of this workshop is to define, together with different communities, the initial requirements for developing a useful framework around FAIR mappings including the requirements to adhere to the FAIR principles. 

This workshop is organised by FAIR-IMPACT and the SSSOM developer community.

DOORS Mobilisation and Mutual Learning Workshop

DOORS Workshop

Constanta, Romania, 6 April 2023.

The first round of the DOORS project’s Mobilisation and Mutual Learning (MML) workshops will kick off on April 6, 2023, in Constanta, Romania. The goal of the workshop is to bring together experts and users of marine products, to raise awareness and share knowledge and skills, using Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) principles.

Objectives of the workshop

  • To engage Black Sea citizens and stakeholders in highly participatory training and co-creation activities to ensure suitability of existing and future Research Infrastructure services to the Black Sea region;
  • To train researchers and companies on how to use existing specific services, tools, data, EU data aggregation infrastructures and services (e.g. EMODnet) and protocols offered by the European Marine Research Infrastructures, to make the most of existing data and monitoring initiatives that can feed into the Blue Economy and political decision making for the region;
  • To set in motion inclusive mechanisms for international sharing of knowledge, building common understanding and cocreating solutions to marine societal challenges and base them on the RRI principles and socio-technical approach.

Session Topics

Sessions include plenary expert talks, round table discussions and hand-on practical exercises to explore existing pan-European marine data infrastructures including:

  • The European Marine Observation and Data Network (EMODnet) and how to navigate the marine products catalogue, identify relevant products for the specific users and how to use them.
  • The Marine Litter Watch (MLW), a citizen-based app that aims to help fill data gaps in beach litter monitoring.
  • DOORS Observation Mapping Tool which illustrates the main marine observing capacities and marine data infrastructures identified in the Black Sea.
  • The DOORS #BlackSeaLitterFree Campaign which raised awareness about marine litter, problems and solutions.
  • An introduction to the DOORS System of Systems (SoS), in a working beta version, demonstrating how to access marine data on the platform .

Introducing our System of Systems (SoS)

In DOORS, the foundation of our work will be our System of Systems (SoS) platform which will revolutionise how we handle, process and understand data from the entire region. One of our main goals is to harmonise scientific approaches for gathering data, integrating all existing data as well as new satellite data into a consolidated system that works for everyone.

Video: A short working demo of the System of Systems interface. © DOORS Black Sea

Register for the Event

This workshop is suitable for anyone responsible for collecting or managing marine environmental data in the public sector, industry for education or research. Please remember to share the event widely within your networks.

Webinar: Digital Earth Twins to build resilience to climate change

Digital Twins Climate Change

Online, 4 April 2023.

BioDT: a Digital Twin prototype to help protect and restore biodiversity

Understanding the forces shaping biodiversity is needed for rational management of natural resources and also to meet the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030 to restore biodiversity in Europe. In particular, researchers need to be able to better predict global biodiversity dynamics and how species interact with their environment and with each other. This can be an extremely difficult task because the processes underlying biodiversity dynamics are complex. Innovative ways to combine data, models and interaction processes are required to predict these dynamics and offer solutions that promote a sustainable management of Earth’s biodiversity and its ecosystems.

For this reason, the BioDT consortium aims to push the current boundaries of predictive understanding of biodiversity dynamics by developing a Biodiversity Digital Twin (BioDT) providing advanced modelling, simulation and prediction capabilities. 

BioDT, DestinE and Digital Earth Twins: a joint webinar to showcase opportunities, challenges and future trends in virtual twins

The webinar “Digital Earth Twins to build resilience to climate change” aims to showcase best practices, challenges and emerging patterns in developing digital twins. The involved speakers are experts and developers in the field and are going to highlight, during a one-hour event, the main aspects to be taken into account while developing highly-complex technology systems, such as BioDT, Destination Earth and ClimateDT.

The event includes also an interactive session where the participants can get in contact with the speakers and ask direct questions.

Registration for the webinar is mandatory, but free.

Register for the event

Draft Agenda (all times CEST)

  • 10:00 – Welcome & Introduction
  • 10:05 – Digital Earth Twins: a roadmap to build resilience to climate change – Christian Kirchsteiger, European Commission DG Connect
  • 10:10 – Introduction of the Biodiversity Digital Twin: objectives, scope, expected results – Jesse Harrison, CSC & BioDT project manager
  • 10:20 – Introduction of the digital earth twins and the DestinE work: objectives, scope, expected results – Thomas Geenen, EMCWF & DestinE
  • 10:25 – BioDT and DestinE: collaboration to strengthen the development of Digital Earth Twins – Jeroen Broekhuijsen, TNO
  • 10:30 – Test your knowledge (interactive session)
  • 10:35 – Panel discussion on the role played by digital twins on green deal & EU digital strategy
    • Jenni Kontkanen, CSC & Climate DT
    • Thomas Geenen, EMCWF & DestinE
    • Marina Tonani, Mercator Ocean & EDITO
  • 11:00 – Conclusion

MARCO-BOLO Kick-off Meeting

MARCO-BOLO Kick-off Meeting

Paris/Online, 14–15 March 2023.

The new MARCO-BOLO project’s hybrid kick-off meeting will take place in Paris from 14–15 March at the Pierre et Marie Curie Campus. The meeting will serve to plan the coordination between the different work pacakges and begin to plan ways of collaborating with similar projects in the field. In particular, two important plenary sessions will be held on data strategy and stakeholder engagement.

MARCO-BOLO, coordinated by EMBRC, aims to structure and strengthen European coastal and marine biodiversity observation capabilities, linking them to global efforts to understand and restore ocean health, hence ensuring that outputs respond to explicit stakeholder needs from policy, planning and industry. You can find out more about it on our Related Projects page.