Webinar on DATA TOGETHER initiative 24/11/2020

On Tuesday 24th of November 2020, the EOSC Secretariat  ( WP 3.4 and WP 7.2 ) organized a webinar on discussing the relevance and impact for the EOSC of the recently established DATA TOGETHER COALITION.  (WDS, RDA, CODATA and GO FAIR)

There were about 90 participants on the call. 

The main conclusions of this webinar were as follows:

In the last 18 months, we have seen a number of interesting CONVERGING trends, related to Open Science worldwide :

• Regional Open Science Initiatives are more and more cooperating ( EU, US, Asia, Australia, Africa)
• Research Funders are teaming up to demand researchers for machine-actionable Data Management Plans and for publishing FAIR (meta)data.
• Universities and Institutes are hiring DATA-STEWARDS to assist researchers.
• Worldwide Data Standard Organizations are more and more collaborating

The recent cooperation between WDS, RDA, CODATA and GO FAIR is regarded as a very important and positive trend. The cooperation result in a document called “DATA TOGETHER”  The impact of this collaboration on the EOSC was discussed at this webinar.   

Find below a number of highlights from the different presentations:

• Cooperation between WDS, RDA, CODATA and GO FAIR is seen as one of the most important “converging trends” in the world of open science.
• Cooperation will bring more transparency and efficiency.
• Created support for policy development (directly and indirectly);
• Improved alignment and synchronization of effort with international work;

• Increased the support for standards development and interoperability, including exchange of best practices at different commons (US, Africa, Asia, Aus, Chin, EOSC)

• Increased promotion of FAIR implementations.  
• Resulted in the set-up of additional working Groups, Seminars, Teams and Sprints.
• Resulted in Cross-Disciplinary research-efforts for COVID.  
• Resulted in a unanimous endorsement for the VODAN Project 
• Created support for extending VODAN into Asia, US and Africa. 
• Increased engagement with Research and science communities
• Increased engagement with Global Open Science Cloud initiatives  ( like GORC)
• Stimulated cooperation with China on OSC ( CNIC-CAS) 

Please visit for the agenda, background on the speakers, the slides that were presented and a recorded video: 

 https://www.eoscsecretariat.eu/events/webinar-eosc-constituency-data-together

For more information on this webinar, please contact Bert Meerman, director of the GO FAIR Foundation at b.meerman@gofairfoundation.org.