Introducing OSTrails: Your Companion to Streamline Planning, Tracking, and Assessing Research Practices

The OSTrails project addresses major challenges in research, such as limited interoperability across research stages, fragmented RDM practices, and varying levels of Open Science maturity across countries and domains. To tackle these, OSTrails is developing a set of open, reusable, and adaptable resources that facilitate seamless information exchange between Data Management Planning (DMP) Platforms, Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), and FAIR Assessment Tools. This empowers research communities to more effectively manage, share, and evaluate their outputs. In this webinar, Elli Papadopoulou from ARC, Deputy Project Coordinator, introduces how the Plan-Track-Assess Framework is defined and used within the project, to enable interoperability, connectivity and machine actionability. Two of the 24 OSTrails pilot initiatives is featured to demonstrate how project solutions are being co-created and implemented in national and domain-specific settings. Andrew Hoffman (CWTC at Leiden University) and Eileen Waegemaekers (SURF) showcase the Netherlands National Pilot, highlighting how dynamic, workflow-integrated DMPs support collaboration and knowledge sharing across institutions. Renaud Duyme (ESRF), representing PaNOSC, presentes a use case, illustrating the use of DMPs, SKGs, and FAIR evaluation for datasets from the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. The webinar marked also the launch of OSTrails Mentorship Programme, presented by Pedro Principe (UMinho). Pedro informes about how the programme is structured and run to support IT infrastructure managers, Research support staff and Funders' support officers advance their skills and deepen their expertise in DMPs, SKGs and FAIR assessment using the OSTrails Toolkit. Participants selected through the Open Call for Mentees will benefit from personalised guidance by experts across the OSTrails consortium.