Image: Grace Gay for Research Professional News
Earma 2022: European Association of Research Managers and Administrators collected ideas at annual conference
The European Association of Research Managers and Administrators is considering launching a group to offer assistance on open science to universities, and discussed the idea at its annual conference in Oslo today.
Open science is when research processes and outputs are openly shared to benefit from scrutiny and reuse. Research funding and performing organisations are increasingly requiring that researchers work openly, including by publishing research papers with open access.
Earma representatives and others working with the association held a discussion with research managers attending the conference on 5 May to identify what their needs from such a group might be and to get a feel for their views on open science.
“The Earma open-science group is not yet 100 per cent launched but we are planning it and it was good to get input here on what people would like to see from it. That is why we wanted to have this session, to get a feeling of what people need,” said research policy expert Daniel Spichtinger, who formerly worked on open science within the European Commission and helped Earma with the preparatory discussions.
Asked by Research Professional News what he learned from the discussions, Spichtinger said: “There were very different levels of knowledge among the participants and different approaches. I thought people would approach it quite narrowly from what they must do in the Horizon [Europe] grant, but actually there were questions that went further than that.”
Spichtinger said feedback included that the group should consider issues such as researcher assessment, and that the current thinking on what the group might do included providing a toolkit and identifying best practices.
Earma will share a summary of its takeaways from the discussions via its website, Spichtinger said. The Earma board will decide whether the group should be created, and the success of the group would depend in part on how many people use it, he added.
Read more news from the conference on the Research Professional News Earma 2022 page.
A version of this article appeared in Research Europe