Connecting Tools and Communities for a Federated Open Science Ecosystem

The Open Science Trails (OSTrails) project [https://ostrails.eu/], funded under Horizon Europe, develops a multi-interoperability framework to improve the planning, tracking, and assessing of research. It responds to the growing need for structured, machine-actionable, and FAIR approaches that can connect policies, services, and research practices across Europe. By addressing gaps in interoperability and adoption alignment, OSTrails supports the implementation of Open Science and contributes to the development of the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). With 24 pilots spanning different domains and national contexts, it generates evidence on how standards and best practices can be embedded into diverse research environments. The project builds on globally developed RDA Groups and Outputs, including the DMP Common Standard, the Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework, and the FAIR Data Maturity Model. Working with European service providers, these outputs are adapted and extended to meet regional needs and contribute standards to the EOSC. Their application can be seen at different levels: Project level: OSTrails brings together key European service providers to adapt and extend RDA recommendations into interoperability frameworks for Data Management Plans (DMPs), Scientific Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), and automated compliance assessment for all of these kinds of digital objects, specifically their FAIRness, ensuring technical alignment and shared standardisation efforts. Institutional level: Funders and research performing organisations in OSTrails pilots adopt these frameworks through the services they use to address challenges such as policy compliance, repository integration, and structured DMP evaluation. Several institutions involved also contributed to the original development of the RDA Outputs, ensuring continuity between design and implementation. Individual level: Researchers and data stewards embed these solutions in their workflows, creating machine-actionable DMPs, linking datasets and other digital objects to SKGs, and receiving automated FAIR feedback. In short, OSTrails validates and extends RDA recommendations in real-world contexts, contributing to the definition and/or refinement of interoperability models, FAIR assessment approaches, and application profiles for machine-actionable DMPs (maDMP) and SKGs. These results also feed back into ongoing RDA discussions and working groups while also inspiring the creation of new groups such as the maDMP API WG. This lightning talk will present the OSTrails interoperability frameworks as examples of how RDA outputs are adapted to the European context, and will then show their operationalization at project, institutional, and individual levels, highlighting both opportunities and challenges for adoption.