Focus on Open Science

Chapter XX: Kaunas (Lithuania)

Dr. Leonas Balaševičius, Kaunas University of Technology 

Dr. L. Balaševičius, is a Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation, Kaunas University of Technology, working in this position since September 2018. As a Vice-Rector, he is responsible for the University research and innovation strategy, organization and control of its implementation, participation in policy making in the research and innovation sectors. 

In 2017-2018, he has headed the Kaunas University of Technology Doctoral School. For almost 10 years (in a period of 2007-2017), Dr. L. Balaševičius headed the Kaunas University of Technology Research Affairs Department as its Director. He has educational profile in Electrical Engineering and Informatics Engineering. He is a co-author of more than 25 research papers.

Presentation

Towards Research Data Management Training at Kaunas University of Technology

Dr Jelena Angelis, EFIS Centre (European Future Innovation System)

Dr Jelena Angelis is a qualified economist working in the field of evaluation and research and innovation policy formation since early 2002 – with SQW Consulting and Oxford Innovation in the UK, Technopolis Group (in 2011-2017) in Tallinn and Brussels and since autumn 2017 as Research Director at a think-tank EFIS (European Future Innovation System) Centre in Brussels. Over the years she has advised such clients as the International Finance Corporation, OECD, European Commission, the Council of the Baltic Sea States, the Nordic Council of Ministers, national and regional governments and agencies as well as universities in Western and Eastern Europe. 

Over the last eight years Jelena’s focus has been on Research Infrastructures (RIs) and the topics linked to their long-term sustainability, such as socio-economic impacts and open science. In August 2017-June 2019 Jelena was a Project Manager of eInfraCentral, a Horizon 2020 funded project which in several ways contributed to the start of the European Open Science Cloud. An all-inclusive catalogue of services and resources development under eInfraCentral is the EOSC Catalogue available through the EOSC Portal. Jelena has been involved in evaluations, impact assessments and studies of programmes and measures linked to RIs in various scientific fields and was a member of the OECD expert group on socio-economic impacts of RIs. The topic of impacts continues in the current Horizon 2020 project RI-PATHS developing a methodology to assess socio-economic impacts of investments into RIs. In parallel, Jelena is also a member of the European Commission’s High Level Expert Group assessing the progress of ESFRI and Other World Class Research Infrastructures towards implementation and long-term sustainability.

Originally from Lithuania, Jelena holds a PhD and MPhil degrees from the University of Cambridge (Judge Business School); a BA (Honours) and a Master’s degree from Vilnius University’s Faculty of Economics.

Presentation

Building together European Open Science Cloud: Perspectives from eInfraCentral

In recent years, the vision of Open Science has emerged as a new paradigm for transparent, data-driven science capable of accelerating competitiveness and innovation. The embodiment of this vision in Europe is the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) which puts into practice the European vision for Open Innovation, Open Science and Open to the World by bringing together services and research products such as computing, storage, data, publications, software and workflows from national and international research infrastructures, research performing organisations, collaborations and projects. In so doing, EOSC aims to position Europe as a global leader in scientific data infrastructures and to ensure that European scientists reap the full benefits of data-driven science.

A H2020 funded project eInfraCentral is described in the EOSC Implementation Roadmap as one of the key building blocks of EOSC. The project was set to address one of the challenges that research communities in Europe face – a fragmentation of the e-infrastructure landscape, which makes it difficult for researchers, innovators, data science practitioners and other users to discover services that are new or not well-known. In their turn, service providers and data producers have difficulty reaching out to potential new users due to the lack of harmonisation across various e-infrastructures. eInfraCentral offers support in advancing Open Science by answering researchers’ and providers’ need for a catalogue  (https://catalogue.eosc-portal.eu/home) and platform  (https://eosc-portal.eu) where all can browse, compare and access various e-services from different scientific domains.

Part of the Panel Discussion

Prof. Valdemaras Razumas, Vice-minister of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania

Prof. V. Razumas, is a Vice-minister of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, working in this position since February 2019. As a vice-minister, he is responsible for the policy making in the field of research and development at the higher education and research institutions, organization and control of its implementation, participation in policy making in the experimental (socio-cultural) development and innovation development (smart specialisation) sectors.

Before joining the Ministry, in 2018 he has chaired the Research Council of Lithuania. For almost 10 years (in a period of 2009-2018) prof. V. Razumas headed the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences as its President. He has educational profile in chemistry. He is a co-author of 2 monographs and 7 patents. More than 180 research papers in international and national scientific journals.

Presentation:

Open Science: National Perspective

Dr. Eugenijus Stumbrys, Research Council of Lithuania

Dr. Eugenijus Stumbrys is the head of Science Policy and Assessment Unit of the Research Council of Lithuania.

In 2002–2009 he was director of the Centre for Quality Assessment in Higher Education.

E. Stumbrys was member of the Board of Governors of the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (2014–2017), member of Selection board of Erasmus Mundus Programme under the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency established of the European Commission (2007–2008).

He serves as an expert in various working groups of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania, the Research Council of Lithuania, of the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Innovation of the Republic of Lithuania.

He has extensive experience in management of higher education and research assessment. His fields of interests are assessment of higher education and research, policy and instruments of higher education and research.

E. Stumbrys has a PhD in physics from Vilnius University in 1992.

He is co-author of 18 books and CD about Lithuanian higher education system, more than 30 articles.  

Presentation

Open Access to Scientific Publications and Data – Point of View of the Research Council of Lithuania

Dr Marta Teperek, TU Delft

Marta did a PhD in molecular biology at the University of Cambridge. In 2015 she joined the Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of Cambridge and led the creation and development of the Research Data Management Facility, which supported researchers in good management and sharing of research data. In 2017 Marta moved to TU Delft in Netherlands, where she is leading the Data Stewardship project. Marta serves on the Editorial Board of the Data Science Journal and Co-Chairs the Research Data Alliance Libraries for Research Data Interest Group. She regularly publishes blog posts and peer-reviewed publications on topics of data management and open science and is professionally active on Twitter.

Twitter: @martateperek

ORCiD: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8520-5598es. 

Presentation

On a cultural journey to better data 

Recommendations on how to better support researchers in good data management and sharing practices are typically focused on developing new tools or improving infrastructure. Yet research shows the most common obstacles are actually cultural, not technological. Cultural change involves changing people’s hearts and minds. But how to achieve this?

During this talk I will provide examples of various innovative strategies which institutions use to effectively engage with their researchers about research data. I will also discuss the suitability of these different approaches to various institutional settings. Finally, using TU Delft as an example, I will explain how these different strategies can be combined to provide comprehensive data management support for the research community.

Part of the Panel Discussion

Dr. Tiberius Ignat, Scientific Knowledge Services

Tiberius Ignat is the Director of Scientific Knowledge Services, a company which specialises in helping the European libraries to embrace new technologies and ways of working. He runs in partnership with UCL Press and LIBER Europe a successful series of workshops - Focus On Open Science, now in its fourth year. He is a long-time individual member of LIBER, member of European Citizen Science Association and Citizen Science Association (US) and a member of the Scientific Committee for OAI11, the CERN - UNIGE Workshop on Innovations in Scholarly Communication.

Tiberius Ignat has a personal interest in Open Science, particularly Citizen Science and the management of this cultural change. 

He has a PhD in Library and Information Science from the University of Bucharest.

Presentation:

Citizen Science: Why should we Bother?

There are two major concerns for scientists: the Nature and the Society. All involved make fundamental and applied efforts to discover knowledge and to build meaning on it. Scholars search for sustainable progress; beings are rubbing shoulders on planet Earth. We all need data and collective intelligence that is orders of magnitude larger than what scientists could do alone. The underuse of citizen science is a missed opportunity for science and society.

You are invited to take part in a cultural change and help both Science and Society to build a bridge that lasts, by developing skills, training programmes and research support services for citizen science in your research organisation.

Dr. Peter Kraker, Open Knowledge Maps

Dr. Peter Kraker is the founder and chairman of Open Knowledge Maps, a charitable non-profit dedicated to dramatically increasing the visibility of research findings for science and society alike. A long-time open science advocate, he is known for coining the term Open Methodology and for his leading role in creating The Vienna Principles – A Vision for Scholarly Communication in the 21st Century. Peter is a member of the GO FAIR executive board, coordinator of the GO FAIR Implementation Network on Discovery, and a core team member of the Open Science Network Austria (OANA). Prior to founding Open Knowledge Maps, Peter was a senior researcher at Know-Center, Austria’s leading research center for data-driven business and big data analytics, managing the topic of Open Science.

Presentation

Open Knowledge Maps - Discovery for an Open Science 

Abstract: With 3 million research papers published each year, discovery becomes increasingly difficult. Open Knowledge Maps is a revolutionary search engine that enables researchers, students, and practitioners to quickly identify relevant resources. Instead of long, unstructured lists of search results, we create visual overviews of research topics, so-called knowledge maps. On https://openknowledgemaps.org users can create knowledge maps based on 150+ million scientific outputs. Our services have been met with a lot of enthusiasm, and so far we have had more than half a million users from all around the world. In addition, we welcomed more than 1,500 participants in training events. Open Knowledge Maps is a charitable non-profit built on the principles of open science. All of our content, data and software are openly licensed, and we invite our members to co-create the platform with us, making it both community-driven and community-owned.

Part of the Panel Discussion

Dr. Kristina Hettne, Centre for Digital Scholarship, Leiden University Libraries

Kristina Hettne (1978), PhD, is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Centre for Digital Scholarship, Leiden University Libraries in Leiden, The Netherlands.

She obtained her master in computer science from Skövde University in Sweden in 2003 and shortly thereafter joined the computational toxicology group at AstraZeneca R&D in Mölndal, Sweden as a research scientist. In 2006, she moved to the Netherlands to pursue her PhD degree in bioinformatics of toxicogenomics, which she obtained from the University of Maastricht in 2012. In 2011 she joined the BioSemantics group at the Leiden University Medical Center as postdoctoral researcher. From 2015 to 2018 she led the group’s research on knowledge discovery applications as a senior researcher. In October 2018 she joined the Centre for Digital Scholarship at the Leiden University Libraries as a Digital Scholarship Librarian, where she helps researchers navigate Open Science and shape the future of research data management. She is the Centre’s liaison with GO FAIR and part of the FAIR Convergence Matrix development team for optimizing the reuse of existing FAIR-related resources. She is a review editor for “Frontiers in Big Data”, member of the Advisory Board of the Wiley journal “Genetics & Genomics Next”, and co-author of more than 30 research publications.

Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4182-7560

Impactstory: https://profiles.impactstory.org/u/0000-0002-4182-7560/

Twitter: @KristinaHettne

Presentation:

Narrowing the gap between international FAIR Best Practices for Open Science and University implementation

Leiden University (LU) adapted a data management regulation in 2016. The regulation embraces the Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) principles. To implement the regulation a programme was established. The focus of the programme was in first instance to raise awareness and setup services to make data and software Findable and Accessible and to train researchers on data management planning. In 2019 the programme has entered its second phase with an increased focus on implementing the machine-actionable aspects of FAIR. In addition, a programme dedicated to Open Science is due to start in 2020. The presentation will look at how LU closes the feedback loop between emerging Best Practices for implementation of the FAIR principles for Open Science from international organisations while keeping the focus on the researcher. LU engages closely with the international bottom-up organisations GO FAIR, the Research Data Alliance (RDA) and CODATA. In this way LU can accelerate the uptake and availability of the emerging best practices and judge better the suitability of solutions to its researchers. The presentation will touch upon setting up Bring Your Own Data FAIRification and Open Science workshops, the development of a terminology for FAIR stewardship skills, and introduce the FAIR Convergence Matrix for optimizing the reuse of existing FAIR-related resources.

Part of the Panel Discussion

Vilius Stančiauskas, Public Policy and Management Institute

Vilius Stančiauskas is Director for Research & Policy Advice at PPMI. He holds a MSc in Economics from the University of Bristol.  Vilius has been primarily involved in the evaluation and impact assessment of the EU’s research and innovation policy, and has carried out multiple evaluations and studies in the areas of health research, researcher careers and mobility, as well as cross-cutting economic analyses and assessments of EU Added Value in FP7 and H2020. Currently Vilius leads three projects involving big data techniques which look into the performance of the EU’s research and innovation system, including the Data4Impact project which is developing novel indicators for the improved monitoring of research activities in the health domain. Another project is a large-scale study launched by DG RTD which aims to track the medium and long-term results and impacts of the FP7 Cooperation programme. Methodologically, Vilius is interested in the use of unstructured data for social science research and the related techniques such as machine learning, neural networks, topic modelling and entity recognition in text data.

Presentation

Big data as a use case for open text and data mining

The presentation will focus on the application of big data techniques in research and R&I policy evaluation. What is the state-of-the-art in this field, and what are the new possibilities that open data sources bring bout? What is the potential data derived from text data and what can it tell about the results and impact of research? Finally, are decission makers willing to embrace the new methods and what does it tell about the usefulness of open TDM? 

Dr. Katarzyna Gaca-Zając, Elsevier 

Katarzyna Gaca-Zając, PhD Eng., is a graduate of University of Strathclyde, with almost a decade of experience in research and teaching at an academic level in Europe; a specialist in polymer chemistry and studies of chemical reactions’ kinetics. Currently a Customer Consultant for Central-Eastern Europe in Elsevier. A knowledgeable expert on scientific databases and Elsevier solutions for researchers and information specialists, who is passionate about ethics in scientific publishing, as well as about widely understood bibliometrics.  

Presentation

Open Access and Open Science: making it happen

The presentation will provide an overview of how Open Science and Open Access can be facilitated and enabled through a variety of recent initiatives, which began to change the landscape of Open Science in Europe. Examples of initiatives driven by Elsevier, as well as an overview of recently signed pilot agreements will be given to reflect the aforementioned changes. Alongside these, an overview of the value of publishing data in an open model will be given, while addressing the most common fears and misconceptions of the authors.

Dr. Paul Ayris, University College London, UK

Dr Ayris is Pro-Vice- Provost (UCL Library Services). He joined UCL in 1997. 

Dr Ayris was the President of LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) 2010-14 and Advisor to the LIBER Board until 2018. He is Co-Chair of the LERU (League of European Research Universities) INFO Community. He chairs the OAI Organizing Committee for the Cern-Unige Workshops on Innovations in Scholarly Communication. He is also the Chair of JISC Collections’ Content Strategy Group. On 1 August 2013, Dr Ayris became Chief Executive of UCL Press. He is a member of the Provost and President’s Senior Management Team in UCL.

He has a Ph.D. in Ecclesiastical History and publishes on English Reformation Studies.

Presentation:

EOSC and the future of research and innovation in Europe 

As defined by the European Commission, Open Science consists of 8 pillars of understanding, amongst which are FAIR data and the European Open Science Cloud. Drawing on the results of the EC-funded LEARN project, this paper will look at the challenges which research data management brings to the research institution in an Open Science landscape where research data are at least as equally valued as publications. How, in Rewards systems, can FAIR and/or Open research data be valued as a route to reward and promotion? The paper will look at how these concepts have been embodied into the new UCL Academic Promotions Framework.  In terms of skills development, what needs to happen to equip researchers (especially early career researchers) with the knowledge they need to work in a data-intensive environment? A recent European report has shown that, for the EU, the cost of not using FAIR data will be 10.2 bn euros a year. A second report promotes policy recommendations to make the FAIR data model sustainable. The paper will conclude by looking at the research infrastructure being put in place by UCL (University College London) to deliver on the research data agenda by studying in detail the launch of its new research data repository, which takes Open and FAIR data as the default.

Dr. ir. Shalini Kurapati, Politecnico di Torino

Dr. ir. Shalini Kurapati is a senior research fellow of Open Science at the Politecnico di Torino in Italy. Her role is to promote a university wide research program for the development of a roadmap to support research data management and open science within the context of a university of technology. She closely collaborates with the OpenAIRE and RDA national nodes in Italy for policy benchmarking and to organise joint training activities. Previously, she had worked as a data steward at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). She holds a PhD as well as 7 years of research experience from the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft. Her topics of interest and expertise are not limited to research integrity, FAIR principles for data and software, data protection, privacy and ethics. She is a Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP/E). Shalini also co-founded  clearbox.ai, a tech startup that provides tools for human-centric and trustworthy Artificial Intelligence. 

Part of the Panel Discussion

Professor Dr Vilma Petrikaitė, Lithuanian University of Health Sciences  

Vilma Petrikaitė is Professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy and  Head of Preclinical Research Center of Lithuanian University of Health Sciences and senior researcher at Life Sciences Center of Vilnius University. For 4 years she was President of the Lithuanian Society of Young Researchers and actively promoted Open Access by participating in several initiatives.

Vilma got her PhD degree in Pharmacy. She has gained a lot of experience in research institutions overseas, e.g., in the frame of BAFF program at Houston Methodist Research Institute in USA, also for several months at the cancer research institute in Barcelona and as a visiting researcher at Colorado University Denver, USA. Recently Vilma gained experience in the field of nanomedicine during her scholarship in Helsinki University. Vilma’s main research interests are drug activity and transport in tumor microenvironment, targeted cancer nanosystems, tumor 2D, 3D cell and animal models. 

Part of the Panel Discussion

Dr. Ir. Santosh Ilamparuthi, TU Delft

Dr. Ir. Santosh Ilamparuthi is a Data Steward at TU Delft, Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science. Santosh did a PhD in mechanical engineering at University of Minnesota. He has been a Data Steward since February 2019 and came to it due to his own encounters with poorly documented and inadequately archived data during his PhD. As a Data Steward he is currently involved in developing the RDM policy for his faculty while supporting researchers with all their data management needs. He is particularly interested in data access committees and also in how they fit into open access in science.

Part of the Panel Discussion

Valentas Gružauskas

Valentas Gruzauskas is a PhD candidate in operation research in logistics. The PhD thesis focuses on application of agent-based modelling e-grocery industry. Valentas is also working with R&D projects, which focuses on the real estate valuation, and market trend analysis. He is working with open access programming language such as Python, R and Netlogo. Valentas main research focuses on algorithm application to solve business problems, which consistently requires him to learn state of the art approaches and to obtain data not only from open access community, but also from private enterprises. His recent proposed methodological approach to analyze strategies of supply chain resilience by using agent-based modeling has been published after passing a very rigorous peer-review process (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118225)”. Read more of Valenta's publications under his ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6997-9275

Part of the Panel Discussion