1. Skills & capabilities for people & organisations in open science: work in EOSCPilot, FOSTER+ and elsewhere
This presentation draws on work by all the staff at the
Digital Curation Centre
Kevin Ashley
Digital Curation Centre
@kevingashley
The DCC is supported by the University of Edinburgh, the European Commission H2020 programme and other income sources
Reusable with attribution: CC-BY

2. My home – the DCC
Mission – to increase capability and capacity for research data reuse in organisations
Not just a UK problem – an international one
Training, shared services, consultancy, events, guidance, policy, standards, futures
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Outline
Work in EOSCPilot skills work package:
A project to develop and define what EOSC will be
Work in FOSTER & FOSTER+
Projects which create, find & promote open science skills
Other work we and others do of relevance to open research
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4. Some of that other work – policy
Released May 2017
Complete listing
Grouping – using policy & intention
Comparison of those with policies
Focus is national, not funder, policy
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Context
Builds on DCC monitoring of funder policies – as standalone service & to support DMPOnline™
Part of 3-year agreement with SPARC-Europe
Some fully-commissioned work, some co-funded
Includes briefing papers such as “The open data citation advantage”
Last work like this was in 2013 – much has changed since
Other work either looked at government data or open access publication
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Findings
‘Policies’ have many forms – roadmaps, laws, concordats, Codes, funder policies
11 EU member states have national policy relating to research data
ERA: 2 have policy, 1 (Iceland) has active plans
9 more have known plans or intentions
Primarily driven by research funders
Open public data policies often precede those on research data
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7. Landscape review for Wellcome Trust
Recognition by many sources that data stewardship is an area with a large and growing skills gap
EOSC HLEG report; McKinsey report in 2008
For more depth see DCC report for Wellcome Trust (2016):
Picture isn’t obvious.
In 2008, who had highest per-capita rates of production of data scientists?
What rate of increase in production is necessary to fill the gap of 500,000 people?
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8. Data stewardship - action
“The EOSC declaration highlights the need for higher education, the training system, and on-the-job skills development to provide the necessary skills and education in research data management, data stewardship and data science” (
“EOSC has a critical role to play in the task of matching needs to provision across Europe. EOSCpilot is making a start by cataloguing the current provision of education and training in research data management, data stewardship and data science, helping identify gaps in Delivery.”
Action needed at local, national & international level
See also (for example) work by Belmont Forum e-infrastructure group (
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9. What’s EOSCPilot about?
Joining up existing research infrastructures & e-infrastructures
Defining policy & governance for this loose federation
Proving it can work – science demonstrators
Tackling skills & capabilities required
Codifying skills
Identifying provision
Identifying (and filling?) gaps
Skills WP – DCC working with KIT, LIBER, DANS, EGI
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10. Skills & capabilities – What’s this workpackage about?
People and organisations
What skills do I need to make use of …
What capabilities does my organisation need to play a part in this distributed infrastructure?
How should these be delivered/acquired/assessed?
What skills does a data steward/data scientist/data producer need?
Last builds on work of EDISON project:
The European Open Science Cloud for Research pilot project is funded by the European Commission, DG Research & Innovation under contract no

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Findings so far
We’ve identified some significant gaps in provision
We’ve found a good way of making training materials & provision discoverable, using schema.org principles
Some research domains are doing a good job already; don’t interfere!
Need diverse means of provision
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FOSTER+
Project + successor concentrating on open science skills
Identifying training; creating materials; delivering training
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FOSTER provision
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14. FOSTER & open data – 330+ resources
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15. FOSTER helps you create
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16. Things that are out there
RDM MOOC
MANTRA
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Guides
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18. Example of generic data skill – data quality
Early DCC training (DC101) included module on data quality
Everyone loves quality – few understand what it is or how to assess it
Quality dimensions are discipline-independent
Quality value is use-dependent
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19. Open training material in Zenodo
Openly accessible online training materials which can be shared and repurposed for RDM training. All contributions in any language are welcome.
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20. Good data management – essential skill for open research
Data management is a fundamental research skill
Your research will be better; others will benefit as well
Not all data can be fully open; RDM helps us make it as open as possible
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