OSTrails aims to improve the way scientific knowledge is planned, monitored and evaluated beyond existing methods and to foster pan-European collaboration to improve tools and link key parts of them for research and innovation. The project is coordinated by OpenAIRE, which provides an open science communication infrastructure to support European research. It involves key players in data management planning, FAIR assessment tools and knowledge graphs from across Europe.
Scientists from FIT CTU are involved in one of the key parts of data management - data scheduling, with the aim of simplifying and automating the whole process through machine processing of researchers' plans. They are working on increasing the level of automation and linking the individual tools of the system so that the result of the planning is not just a formal document for funders, but a truly usable and machine-actionable Data Management Plan. This automation will not only speed up the work but also allow researchers to focus more on the research itself and less on technical and administrative issues.
"It is a real honour for our team to be part of this important project and to have the opportunity to take this issue forward by leaps and bounds, both in terms of standardisation and technical solutions, as well as their adaptation to Czech conditions and their subsequent use." doc. Ing. Robert Pergl, Ph.D., "In the project, we are also cooperating with our national grant agencies GAČR and TAČR, which, like other agencies in Europe, are supposed to encourage research data to be published in accordance with FAIR principles. This is often administratively and technically challenging for them, but this is where we can help them significantly," he adds.
Within the framework of the pilot project in the Czech Republic, FIT CTU cooperates with partners such as CESNET, the National Technical Library (NTK) and grant agencies GACR and TAČR. The aim of these institutions is to support researchers to ensure that research data meet the FAIR principles (findability, accessibility, interoperability, reusability). In practice, this means that the tools developed within the project will enable researchers, but also grant agencies, to reduce the administrative burden and simplify work with data - from storage to reuse in research. Part of the pilot project will also take place directly at CTU. In the DSpace system, designed for storing publications and other outputs of the university, the outputs of the project will allow to verify compliance with the FAIR principles, i.e. in particular the quality of all necessary data (metadata) in accordance with the recommendations. This process will support the FAIR quality of CTU outputs.
A team of scientists from FIT CTU, led by doc. Robert Pergl, has been actively developing the advanced open-source tool Data Stewardship Wizard (DSW) for over six years, which helps researchers to plan data management in detail. This tool also includes an important educational aspect, as it guides researchers through different areas of data stewardship and emphasizes the use of existing standards as well as other recommendations such as the FAIR principles or Open Science. DSW is part of the federation of linked tools in the OSTrails project.
Ing. Marek Suchánek, Ph.D. et Ph.D., Head of the Laboratory of Standardized Systems at FIT CTU, says: "The OSTrails project is key to building EOSC as it uses various existing tools already in use across Europe and focuses on their appropriate interconnection. As a result, these (and possibly other future) tools will be able to efficiently share information and collectively deliver value to scientists, data stewards, research institutions and grant agencies, who will no longer have to manually enter and manage often the same data in multiple places. Practical applicability will be tested in a series of thematic and national pilot implementations. In addition, the project has an outreach beyond Europe through close links with the international Research Data Alliance (RDA) and its interest and working groups. This is therefore a very key involvement for DSW, also in view of our leading role in one of the so-called work packages of the project."