OpenAIRE Interoperability workshop, University of Minho, 7-8 February

The  OpenAIRE Interoperability Workshop was held at the University of Minho, Portugal, on the 7/8 February 2013. I was there, wearing a number of different hats. Firstly, as a member of the OpenAIREplus team, secondly, presenting about PREPARDE and our work on workflows and cross-linking, and thirdly as a data scientist and repository manager.

My presentation was videoed and can be seen on the  OpenAIRE Vimeo channel. I've attached my slides to this blog post too.

I made it to the workshop on the first day (after a few hiccups with broken planes) just in time for the session on Open Science, Open Data and Repositories, which was part of the University of Minho's Open Access Seminar. This was a really good session for introducing people to key concepts about open data and open access, and even gave us a bit of a history lesson too about how this whole scientific publishing thing got started. (I never knew quite how pivotal  Henry Oldenburg was - not only was he the founding editor of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, but he also pretty much invented the process of pre-publication peer-review.)

The session on OpenAIREplus was also really useful for getting a feel about what OpenAIRE are trying to do to extend their services to include research data, especially in the case where it's linked directly to publications*. Discussions about this were continued on the following day in a splinter group talking about the proposed OpenAIRE guidelines for Data Archive Managers.

I'm very glad to see that these guidelines are based around the  DataCite metadata schema, tying in nicely with the work we're doing at BADC and the general direction data citation seems to be going at the moment. The plan is to dig out some case studies of data sets linked to published papers, and I have a couple in mind already, one of which relates to my (very soon to be published) GDJ paper.

OpenAIRE and PREPARDE have a lot of shared interests, so it was very nice to be able to connect with them at this event, and even start talking about what should come next by way of data publication and article-data linking in the future. The calls for Horizon 2020 will be out soon...

*I'm a bit wary of this, as it's almost putting data as second class citizens in comparison to articles, but I do appreciate they have to limit the scope of the project somehow in order to get stuff done.