What is the idea of open science? Is it just about making publications freely available, or perhaps about building a scientific community based on the spirit of academic communication and collaboration? At the University of Gdansk, the answer to this question is being developed by the Research Data Management and Open Science Section, which has recently partnered with OpenAIRE.

'The UG Knowledge Base has joined Open AIRE, which creates a network of European infrastructure consisting of, among other things, repositories. This organisation is made up of people who are passionate about open science; they invited us to show our approach to this idea,' says Head of the Section for Research Data Management and Open Science mgr Agnieszka Wasilewska. ’We wanted to share the fact that we approach the idea of open science a little differently than everyone else.'

The result of this collaboration is an article on the OpenAIRE website, in which Section staff describe their out-of-the-box approach to promoting open science: from gamification of training courses, to creating an educational puzzle ‘UkłaDaMy Plan’, to developing a board game on research data security.

Open science is not only about publications

'One of the new activities in the field of open science is making research data available in repositories, i.e. any data on the basis of which a publication is later created,' says chief IT specialist Zbigniew Ruszczyk. 'Until recently, it was not necessary to make them available, but now it is important when applying to funding institutions such as the National Science Centre.'

According to employees of the Research Data Management and Open Science Section, research data must meet the requirements of the acronym FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, reusable).

With these requirements, the data can later be used by other researchers to prepare their own publication based on the data or aggregate data from several sources. Sharing also increases the educational potential of the publication, as young researchers can see if they can reproduce these results and learn how to conduct the research process based on the data description.

What is the future of open science at UG?

‘We definitely want to promote the idea of open science and continue to provide training on opening up research data and organise workshops where we use games. We see that this works. Thanks to a different approach, these trainings are not boring and the knowledge is absorbed more,' says Agnieszka Wasilewska.

‘We are also working towards creating a network of data stewards in the faculties. These would be research data specialists in individual disciplines,' says Zbigniew Ruszczyk. ‘Each discipline has its own specifics, and while some things are common, issues related to data quality or metadata standards and domain dictionaries are very discipline-specific.’

On a day-to-day basis, the Research Data Management and Open Science Section supports researchers in the research data management process. The unit assists researchers in selecting a repository and preparing a research data management plan, which funding bodies such as NCN require.