9.1. Best Practices in Training for Open Science: Experiences from FOSTER's Two-Year Training Programme

Training young researchers as well as multipliers who can reach out to them – namely librarians, project administrators and other relevant institutional stakeholders – was the aim of the two-year training programme which FOSTER started in February 2014. Changing attitudes, traditions and publishing habits requires continuous efforts on different levels with multi-faceted approaches in an environment characterised by strong forces of inertia. Libraries play a big role in this picture as will become clear by analysing the results.

With the help from the community the project has promoted and supported both engaging and instructive events that reached out to diverse disciplinary communities and countries in the European Research Area during 2014 and 2015. Through two open Calls for Trainings many different institutions and organisations applied for and successfully organised training events on Open Access and Open Science. The first round of funded training events in 2014 resulted in more than 1,700 participants in over 70 training events. Preliminary numbers indicate that during the second year 2015 well over 2,000 participants were trained through 24 initiatives in 18 countries. Among the most popular training topics was Open Access, being on a par with Open Data. The majority of trainings concentrated on young researchers and PhD students, the second largest group, however, being librarians and repository managers.

The presentation will provide an overview of the results in terms of trained audiences, disciplines as well as topics in relation to the FOSTER Open Science Taxonomy, where most of the training materials are now stored and available for re-use via the FOSTER portal. As we think the diversity of approaches was really astonishing, the presentation will summarise good practice examples and share lessons learned such that others organising similar training can benefit from the experiences.

Astrid Orth works in international and national projects and initiatives in the Electronic Publishing Unit in Göttingen State and University Library, with a strong focus on policies and services that enhance open access and research data management in libraries. In 2014 she became Project Officer for the recently started FOSTER project (www.fosteropenscience.eu), which creates Open Science training materials for key stakeholders in European research.