Open Science and Scholarly Communication in Greece: amplifying understanding and building capacity through synergies

Last year, the proposal for a National Open Science Plan in Greece was published outlining the steps that the national stakeholders in Research & Innovation should make. The two OpenAIRE members, “Athena” Research Center (NOAD) and the consortium of academic libraries “HEAL-Link”, have a long standing cooperation in the country. They support each other's work by building the bridges between academia and research, and laying the foundations for the sustainable implementation of Open Science in Greece. In particular, they exchange knowledge and practices on:
- (co-)developing data services that follow best practices to enable FAIRness of data and EOSC compatibility, such as through the Hellenic Data Service “HELIX” and the University data repositories “HARDMIN”.
- promoting skills on Open Science and Research Data Management (RDM) to incubate competencies of researchers as well as to contribute to upskilling and reskilling of the research support workforce.
- providing apt guidance and support in EU framework programme requests, including the COVID-19 calls, via the OpenAIRE helpdesk and the material in Greek language of the Scholarly Communication Unit of HEAL-Link.

Moreover, “Athena” and HEAL-Link both perform activities to draw the bigger picture, in support of informed decision and policy making. For example, the monitoring reports by SCU/HEAL-Link are giving the community the insights to understand the progress of OA publishing in the country. Similarly, the OpenAIRE NOAD collaborates with others and initiates actions that assist in understanding the current challenges and opportunities in R&I, including the EOSC and the COVID-19 crisis.

The lighting talk will provide a detailed update on the actions that the two organisations have taken to promote Open Science in Greece.