The RESILIENCE service strategy is driven by our research community. We act by continuously listening to researchers to nurture the iterative creation of an ecosystem of services/products/data that have the highest added value for the community. With the growing importance of Open Science (OS) policies, research infrastructures’s also have the role to facilitate the creation and support of an OS culture within their research communities and to drive the digital transformation of research towards the uptake of the FAIR Data Principles (i.e., making digital objects Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Re-usable) . This is meant to ensure that research results and research data that are published online can be found and reused with respect to the licenses and access rights attributed to them. Research infrastructures s are also expected to integrate their services and research products (digital objects) into the wider European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) to make them FAIR for the global community. The implementation of EOSC is based on a long-term process of alignment and coordination pursued by the European Commission since 2015 with the many and diverse stakeholders of the European research landscape. The aim is to connect RIs to EOSC but also to ensure added value of EOSC for the research infrastructure communities.
Many researchers in Religious Studies (RS) are unaware of or struggling to find their way in the new OS and FAIR expectations from funders and peers alike. This lack of clarity can lead to uncertainty over the effects that OS policies have on their own licensing rights regarding their research data and research results, for example. The issue is not specifically limited to the community of RS, most European RIs have OS and FAIR data as a core component in their current strategy. They support their communities of practice by giving tailored advice in combination with access to domain data and technology services for collecting, processing, analysing, archiving, and sharing research results. RESILIENCE wants to contribute to the uptake of FAIR and OS principles in the RS community by providing it with this tailored support. Given that OS and easy access to data in both physical and digital form is a common denominator for the plurality of RS researchers, RESILIENCE can reach the widest possible community by focusing its strategy and effort during the Preparatory Phase (PPP) on giving access to core FAIR data services such as:
● a data repository solution for the FAIR data publication of research data in RS;
● an elaborate TNA program for access to and expertise on physical as well as digital collections;
● a data hub and discovery environment giving access to a wide variety of digital objects (incl. research data and code) described by metadata and referenced by a persistent identifier;
● a RDM support desk.
These specific core FAIR data services were selected as a priority during the PPP based on what is needed in the community and what can be achieved with the available means. During the PPP, the focus is still mainly on laying the organisational, administrative, technical and legal foundations for the infrastructure.
Source: Deliverable D2.1, Services Preparation and Implementation Strategy, version 29.03.2024