Open Science landscaping and strategic development in Romania

Mutual learning workshops (MLW) – March 10, 2020, Bucharest, Romania

On March 10th, 2020, UEFISCDI, through its Open Science Hub Romania organized the first event at national level dedicated to OS strategic framework development. Other 3 events alike will be organized at regional level as well. According to the initial planning these should have been organized until the end on June 2020; taking into account the actual situation with caused by the Coronavirus, a re-planning will be made as soon as it will be possible.

This event is part of a larger initiative (series of mutual learning workshops) – an invitation to dialogue and exchange of good practice between international experts and the main national stakeholders (policy makers, universities and other research institutions, libraries, relevant actors from public and private sector). The initiative is funded through a national project implemented together with the Ministry of Education and Research. This project will deliver a national action plan for Open Science national strategy (along with the RDI national strategy to which it should be correlated). Also, this project is directly correlated to the hub’s activities as the Romanian RDA Node and OpenAIRE Node.

In order to identify the relevant stakeholders for this first event, the mapping has been made taking into account a larger scope: that of their relevance and connection for/ to the OS and EOSC initiatives and projects at European level. Therefore, the mapping which is a still ongoing activity has been made having in mind the project’s NI4OS objectives and this can and will be further used in the project. The mapping of stakeholders is made together with the other national partner of NI4OS, ICI-București to which we strongly collaborate within the common OS activities.

The hub has the main role of connecting the Romanian community to the major projects and actions carried at the European level, (NI4OS, OpenAIRE, RDA Europe). The trainings and information provided in NI4OS have been and will be used for the support documents of the events and disseminated at national level (in a strong collaboration with ICI).

Summary of 10th March workshop

We had a number of great speakers at our event. See the full list of presenters as follows: Alina Irimia (OS Hub Ro), Iryna Kuchma (EIFL, OpenAIRE), Dragoș Cătălin Barbu (ICI), Santosh Ilamparuthi (TU Delft), Victor Velter (UEFISCDI), Valentin Cojanu, remote: Niamh Brennan (Trinity College Library) & Marin Dacos (Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation – France).

Main recommendations (measures, targets and milestones) aligned with the strategic European goals describded in depth in the national framework document in the form of objectives and actions:

  • Open Access to all scientific publications (results of publicly funded research) starting 2021
  • A totally new approach regarding sharing and reusing the research data – enabling open research data for all the research publicly funded (as open as possible, as closed as necessary): Starting 2021: introduction of mandatory data management plans (DMPs)
  • Improving understanding of IPRs and other privacy issues. Introducing open licensing
  • Ensuring transparency of publication costs and conditions;
  • Adopting and implementing new evaluation and rewards systems: systems to take into account the impact of scientific research on science and societies and economies in general and the citizen involvement in science, capitalizing on the research impact.
  • Removing barriers for open science: engaging researchers and new users in open science (including citizen science);
  • Development of a new institutional structure responsible with offering constant support and monitoring of the national open science ecosystem.

Thematic sessions

The role of the thematic discussions followed was to capture the interest, needs and recommendations from the national point of view around the topics: open access to the scientific results financed from public funds, article processing charges, RDM and open access to research data, new generation metrics (OS metrics).

Lessons learned

Needs and opportunities captured – to be taken into account in the setting of the national strategic framework; recommendations to be included in the national action plan for open science. These will also be further discussed and new ones will be further identified in a follow-up set-up: webinars and online consultation to be planned; also, dialogue maintained via a mailing list (follow-up groups interested in open science and specific topics discussed in the events to keep an open dialogue facilitated by the OSH Ro).