Challenges of promoting Open Science within the NI4OS-Europe project in Hungary
National Initiatives for Open Science in Europe (NI4OS-Europe) is a Horizon 2020 project related to the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). One of the project objectives is promoting EOSC and open science in 15 Central and East European EU states and EU associated countries.
This paper describes the variety of promoting activities carried out in Hungary as part of the NI4OS-Europe project by the Governmental Agency for IT Development (KIFÜ). All these activities aimed different, sometimes overlapping groups, e.g.:
- publishing researcher interviews on research data management and open science practices for early career researchers;
- open science news feed for open science practitioners;
- publishing an e-learning course on EOSC and open science for graduate and PhD students;
- testing RDM tools for the Hungarian research community;
- organising various events, including the Hungarian Open Science Forum targeting senior researchers and stakeholders;
- an EOSC Champion programme at three major Hungarian universities.
Identifying good practices will give us the chance to find the best communication channels and methods to promote open science and to manage expectations of funders, researchers and librarians.
We will analyse the audience diversity of six NI4OS events organised as part of the project. The anonymized dataset based on registration forms will be filtered by affiliation and profession. We will attempt to identify the main differences of events attracting mostly librarians, and those where majority of the audience were researchers. Results of this analysis might suggest that open science is generally thought to be an issue for librarians on the side of research institutions’ representatives. While librarians are easy to invite to open science workshops, researchers will move mostly when funds and applications are discussed.
Usage data of the open science news feed will also be studied. Having around 200 posts and 5000 visitors in the period of May 2021 – April 2022 gives us the chance to learn about the characteristics of the most visited posts. As expected, event-related posts proved to be the most visited ones. The overall usage shows that posts related to national policies are visited more frequently than international ones.
The paper will also argue that bottom-up and top-down approaches of promoting EOSC need to be used in a delicate balance to reach out to the widest possible audience.
Ákos Lencsés, PhD
Governmental Agency for IT Development, Hungary
Budapest, Hungary
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4461-1105
