RSU Becomes First Latvian Institution of Higher Education to be Admitted to EOSC Association

The decision was taken at the EOSC Association’s fifth general assembly that was attended by academic and research institutions, research consortia, and other research organisations. At the same time, the Higher Education and Science Information Technology Shared Service Centre (VPC), of which RSU is one of the founding members, was admitted to the association as a Latvian mandate organisation.

The EOSC Association was established in 2020 with the aim of bringing together e-infrastructures, digital service providers, projects, and research institutions to implement a common European research data infrastructure. The association is a platform for finding new partners, developing collaborations with data-intensive research infrastructures and learning about new international projects. It currently has 168 members and 81 observers.

The association's infrastructure includes many services, including providing access to research data repositories, software solutions, and training events. It will allow for large-scale research, simulation, and other activities to be carried out using available data and software resources, based on common standards. EOSC is currently in the development phase, but a number of services are already available.

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"One of the priorities of Latvia's open science strategy is to cooperate with EOSC. RSU is the first Latvian research university to be involved in the work of this association.

Membership in the EOSC Association will open up more opportunities for international research collaboration. RSU will be able to influence various processes related to the development of a common research data infrastructure and collaboration with other initiatives.

These include European-level research infrastructures or the European Health Data Space. RSU will be able to collaborate and represent its views together with other Latvian, Baltic, and Nordic institutions," says Liene Nikitina-Zaķe, Director of the RSU Research Department.

RSU has also started other activities related to EOSC. One example is that RSU's institutional research data repository Dataverse was registered on the EOSC portal as a trusted and validated source of research data. This will help integrate the University’s research data into the international information flow and make more efficient use of other services. Horizon Europe calls for proposals have strict conditions in the context of open science and accessibility of research data, therefore, membership in the EOSC Association will facilitate RSU’s involvement in these projects.

On 20 October this year, RSU was awarded a grant from the Cross-disciplinary Science Adoption #2 open call organised by RD-Alliance and the Horizon 2020 EOSC-Future project. The project, “Increasing FAIRness of data processing in Occupational Health and Safety” will be implemented by the Research Department from January to July 2023 in collaboration with the Institute of Occupational Safety and Environmental Health. The project team is planning to organise and process the results of long-time occupational safety surveys in line with international industry standards, making them accessible to researchers. At the same time, it is planned to validate or test the procedures and documents that have already been developed and establish guidelines for handling research data.

In order to ensure a research data management system that adheres to European and international standards, RSU has started to develop a relevant legal and regulatory framework. Several seminars and training sessions have been held at the RSU Doctoral School.