OSTrails organised its first Train-the-Trainer Bootcamp on 25 March in Braga, following a successful two-day General Assembly. The Bootcamp marked a key step as the project moves into its implementation phase, focusing on equipping organisations, trainers, and pilot partners to act as multipliers for the adoption of OSTrails results.

The session brought together technical experts, trainers, and pilot representatives in a highly interactive setting. Participants engaged directly with the teams developing OSTrails tools and services, gaining a practical understanding of implementation requirements, integration workflows, and training approaches.

Pilots and trainers worked closely with participants through group sessions and hands-on activities to explain the OSTrails reference architecture and interoperability frameworks, outline requirements for using the services, and demonstrate their practical application. These sessions fostered strong knowledge exchange and supported participants in preparing their own training activities.

Core OSTrails results and tools in practice

The bootcamp focused on translating OSTrails concepts into concrete implementation practices.

Through hands-on sessions and group work, participants:

• Explored the OSTrails reference architecture and interoperability frameworks 

• Learned how to adopt services within institutional and national infrastructures 

• Tested real integration scenarios across tools and systems 

• Prepared to deliver their own training activities 

Across the different tools presented, a clear convergence is emerging: the focus is not on the tools themselves, but on their ability to implement shared, interoperable approaches. This enables information to move across systems, while keeping DMPs flexible and strengthening their role in structured evaluation and guidance on shared topics.

Learning from pilot implementations

The programme continued with a use‑case implementation session, allowing pilot partners to share progress on their pilots’ activities and engage with the technical staff to clarify questions. This exchange created space for practical discussions on how to apply OSTrails specifications in real settings, helping participants better understand how to move forward in their own contexts.

The discussion highlighted the diversity of pilot approaches and levels of maturity.

• Some national initiatives, such as those in Finland and Portugal, are building strong community engagement around shared DMP application profiles.

• Others, including Croatia and Greece, are working closely with funders to align implementations with national policies and requirements.

• At the same time, thematic infrastructures such as CESSDA and LifeWatch are focusing on improving and connecting domain services to support discovery and enhance the FAIRness of data.

Pilots also shared practical challenges encountered during implementation, such as staff turnover, and dependencies between tasks. These experiences underlined the need for flexibility and continuous coordination. At the same time, the discussions highlighted the importance of trust-based collaboration with national research support services and expert communities: Open dialogue, shared experiences, and ongoing outreach efforts were seen as essential for building momentum and supporting the broader adoption of interoperable solutions across DMPs, FAIR assessment, and research information systems. 

Training Stations: working directly with tools and services

The bootcamp also included interactive training stations, designed to give participants direct access to the tools and services behind OSTrails. 

Pilot partners and technical experts were positioned across dedicated stations, where participants could move between them, ask questions, and discuss their specific implementation needs. There were 7 stations covering key areas, such as FAIR assessment and validation, FAIR benchmarks and metrics, machine-actionable DMPs, DMP evaluation, and Scientific Knowledge Graphs.

Planning for local trainings

At the end of the bootcamp, pilots were challenged to develop and present their own training plans covering webinars, workshops, and hands-on sessions, tailored to different audiences, including researchers, data stewards, and service providers.

A strong emphasis was placed on reusing and adapting training materials to fit local needs, while enabling participants to act as multipliers within their organisations. This marked a shift from learning to active rollout, with pilots preparing concrete activities to be delivered across the consortium over the coming year. Planning for the second edition of the Train-the-Trainers Bootcamp will begin soon.

All training materials, resources, and updates will be made available at the following link: Bootcamps - OSTrails

The OSTrails project successfully hosted a workshop at IDCC 2026 in Zagreb with over 30 participants and lively discussion. Bringing together researchers, developers, and research data management (RDM) experts explored interoperable approaches to managing and sharing research data.

The workshop was delivered with contributions from key OSTrails members, including Tomasz Miksa (TU Wien), Diamantis Tziotzios (CITE), Jakub Jirka (CODE), Andrea Mannocci (CNR), and Esteban Gonzalez (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) alongside other project collaborators.

The workshop also provided an opportunity to engage with Croatian pilot partners our Croatian pilot partners in person Ivana Končić, Bojan Macan, and Alen Vodopijevec.

The workshop aimed to showcase the OSTrails Pathways and Interoperability Frameworks as key mechanisms for validating results and extending the project beyond its three pillars.

Feedback

There is a strong interest in the OSTrails vision, particularly in its potential to connect Data Management Plans (DMPs), Semantic Knowledge Graphs (SKGs), and FAIR assessment workflows into a more cohesive and interoperable ecosystem. Additionally, Electronic Lab Notebooks (ELNs) and data notebooks have been identified as key integration points for future development, highlighting the importance of creating seamless links between data creation, management, and evaluation processes.

Key Focus

The OSTrails Commons was a central point of discussion, highlighting its role in enabling communities to both contribute to and adopt shared solutions beyond the scope of the project for example by enabling communities to reuse and adapt interoperability components such as FAIR-IF and DMP-IF. The workshop also emphasized the importance of moving from technical frameworks toward real-world implementation, with the goal of simplifying research data management (RDM) practices for researchers.

Interactive World Café discussions provided space for participants which encouraged cross-disciplinary exchange and highlighted practical implementation challenges.

The main challenges identified were:

• The need for clearer, community-aligned FAIR definitions to support automated evaluation
• The need for better insights into how SKGs and DMPs can be integrated across workflows
• The challenges of managing large data volumes across disciplines

Impressions

Overall, feedback was very positive, with participants offering suggestions to further improve communication of project outputs and strengthen integration between FAIR and DMP evaluation workflows. These insights will inform the next phase of OSTrails development and support broader adoption across research communities.

The workshop successfully met its objectives to showcase project achievements, promote adoption, gather community feedback, and explore future directions—reinforcing OSTrails’ role in advancing interoperable and researcher-focused RDM solutions.

“By participating in OSTrails, we are strengthening the foundations for a research environment where systems, institutions, and disciplines work together more seamlessly. It brings us closer to a landscape where FAIR principles are not just ideals, but embedded in everyday practice.”

Can you briefly introduce your organisation(s)? How does it/do they contribute to EOSC? 
Sikt – Norwegian Agency for Shared Services in Education and Research is the national agency responsible for digital infrastructure, data management, and shared services for Norway's higher education and research sector. Sikt operates core services including identity and access management, data storage, network infrastructure, and support for research data management across Norwegian universities and research institutions.

Sikt contributes to EOSC through active participation in several European projects and initiatives. A key area of contribution is expertise in international interoperability standards, which is essential for integrating research data across systems and unlocking greater value from data at the European level. In 2025, Sikt has participated in EOSC Association working groups on Technical and Semantic Interoperability and the European Health Data Space (EHDS), providing early insight into European development processes, real opportunities for influence, and a strategic position in the advancement of open science in Europe.

We are furthermore working to establish the foundations for a Norwegian national EOSC node, with the aim of connecting Norwegian research infrastructure and services to the EOSC Federation. Our ambition is to build on existing Norwegian services to deliver real value to Norwegian researchers while contributing to the shared European research data commons.  

What are you most excited about in OSTrails? What are you looking forward to? 
We are excited about OSTrails and the opportunity to help put the FAIR principles into practice in a concrete and practical way. OSTrails provides a real chance to turn those principles into everyday workflows that researchers, institutions, and services can actually use.

We are especially looking forward to contributing to a common framework that works across tools, systems, and even national borders. Research data moves through so many platforms and services, and aligning dataflows and workflows across all of them is both a challenge and a huge opportunity. If we can create standardised, interoperable processes, we not only make the ecosystem more robust but also reduce duplication of effort and confusion for researchers.

Ultimately, making necessary reporting processes more streamlined, efficient, and coherent. When the infrastructure works well, it frees up time and resources for more important things, like producing highquality research and enabling others to build on it.

We see OSTrails as an important stepping stone towards a more FAIR research landscape, and towards much better utilisation of research results in the long run.

How is planning, tracking and assessing research being realised in your country/scientific domain?

Norwegian institutions, the Research Council of Norway (RCN), and other national actors operate a wide range of activities, tools, and services for planning, tracking, and assessing research. In response to a coordinated initiative from major Norwegian institutions, Sikt is currently piloting a new national DMP service to support a more standardised and coordinated approach to research planning and tracking. We are working to integrate this service with Sikt’s core systems as well as other relevant national and international services.

One key component in this ecosystem is the new Norwegian Research Information Repository (NVA), a joint national CRIS and publication repository that recently replaced Cristin as the reporting tool for all publicly funded research institutions in Norway. In addition to NVA, several other services and initiatives contribute to tracking, monitoring, and assessing Norwegian research. Such as annual RCN reporting processes, the Open Access Barometer (currently preparing for an overhaul), NOR‑CAM, and others.

On 5 February 2026, OSTrails participated in the EVERSE Community Engagement Event at CERN, Geneva. Elli Papadopoulou (Athena Research Center) presented the work on τηε OSTrails Commons to an audience of Research Software Engineers, researchers, and open science stakeholders from across Europe’s five EOSC Science Clusters.

EVERSE is a fellow Horizon Europe project building a European network for research software quality. The connection between the two projects runs deeper than a shared funding programme: Daniel Garijo (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) is an active contributor to both, bringing tools he has developed — notably FOOPS! and FAIR-OS — that are integrated into OSTrails’ FAIR assessment work while also informing EVERSE’s software quality framework. His involvement has been instrumental in ensuring that knowledge, approaches, and emerging standards flow actively between the two teams, and meant the conversation at CERN built on an already established foundation rather than starting from scratch.

EVERSE Notable Results

The event showcased key exploitable results from the EVERSE project. Two stood out as particularly relevant to the OSTrails community. 

• The RSQToolkit is a curated collection of tasks, tools, research software stories, and resources designed to support repeatability, reproducibility, and trustworthy software development and maintenance. 

• The TechRadar is a visual dashboard built on the RSQToolkit, helping practitioners navigate and apply its guidance in day-to-day software development work. 

Together, these outputs represent EVERSE’s approach to making software quality guidance actionable and community-driven.

OSTrails for open (source) research software

Our presentation focused on three areas of the OSTrails work most directly relevant to the research software quality community.

The Plan-Track-Assess Interoperability Frameworks and Commons: the standardised, open specifications that enable different tools, platforms, and communities to exchange information about data and software management in a consistent and machine-actionable way. We presented concrete examples of how these commons operate in practice across OSTrails pilots.

The DMP Evaluation Service, currently under active development as an open source project. This service enables automated assessment of Data Management Plans, including software (management) components, checking completeness and alignment with FAIR principles, and making DMP quality measurable and comparable at scale.

Software quality in OSTrails through two dedicated frameworks: 

• theFAIR Assessment Interoperability Framework (FAIR-IF), which provides a standardised vocabulary and reference model for producing consistent, comparable FAIR assessments across tools; 
• and the SKG Quality Toolbox, which connects entities like source code, workflows, scripts, and containers to the broader research ecosystem through our Scientific Knowledge Graph Interoperability Framework, making software contributions traceable, assessable, and creditable across the research lifecycle.

Key points for collaboration

The discussions at CERN highlighted how two projects with distinct mandates can find genuine points of exchange. 

The two meet in what each identified as valuable in the other’s work: OSTrails’ FAIR assessment dimensions and software metadata quality indicators are directly relevant to how EVERSE measures and communicates software quality, while EVERSE’s quality guidance and metrics offer OSTrails a richer picture of what software quality means beyond FAIRness alone. Sharing metrics, aligning indicators, and building on each other’s open specifications is a natural next step.

The RSQToolkit’s quality guidance is a natural input to FAIR assessment: the indicators EVERSE has developed could be expressed as machine-actionable FAIR tests within the OSTrails FAIR-IF, enabling consistent application and cross-domain comparison. The TechRadar, as a structured catalogue of tools and practices, maps naturally onto OSTrails SKG Quality Toolbox — both are concerned with making software quality visible and navigable.

On the planning side, the DMP Evaluation Service and the OSTrails DMP Interoperability Framework offer EVERSE communities a path from informal software quality practices toward structured, interoperable Software Management Plans — connecting quality intent to verifiable evidence within the EOSC research infrastructure.

All OSTrails resources are openly available at docs.ostrails.eu and github.com/OSTrails.