The project
The Horizon Europe project FAIR-IMPACT: Expanding FAIR solutions across EOSC, opens an external URL in a new windowstarted in June 2022 and finished in 2025. It was coordinated by DANS and supported by 27 additional partners, opens an external URL in a new windowfrom 11 countries. The project aimed at expanding FAIR solutions across Europe to allow researchers to find, access, reuse, and combine research results. It supported adopting the FAIR principles and implementing FAIR-enabling practices, tools, and services across scientific communities at a European, national, and institutional level.
The support programme for repositories and data service providers
The Center for RDM participated in the second support program, opens an external URL in a new window, which was based on six online workshops from September 2024 to March 2025. In the workshops and during the independent work periods in between, we focused on these topics:
- understand drivers for becoming more FAIR-enabling
- assess current FAIR-enabling capabilities
- find suitable tools, approaches, and methods
- develop a FAIR implementation action plan and engagement strategy.
Our work was supported by the continuous, dedicated, and tailored mentoring support of the FAIR-IMPACT expert team and the exchange with other participants.
The outcomes
During the programme, we identified and started working towards a range of actions to increase engagement with our data repository users and the efficiency of raising awareness of good RDM practices among them. We particularly wanted to reach beyond the group of established users, to those others who may not feel they need help with RDM but could significantly benefit from it. We aimed to improve the efficiency of our awareness-raising work by scaling it up instead of having similar discussions with each researcher individually. Additionally, we covered smaller topics that had not been on our agenda so far.
Some of the long-term activities and goals we looked at in the programme were:
- make the deposit policy machine-actionable and register in FAIRSharing
- establish per-faculty data stewards (identification, training, regular meetings)
- create onboarding documents for new researchers
- seek feedback & ideas from users (surveys, interviews, visits)
In other words: Staying on track, smoothing the ride!
More information
The key actions and lessons learned were discussed in an exit interview and summarised in a co-produced FAIR Implementation Story that is now publicly available:
Piroi, F., & Moser, M. (2025, August 28). Staying on Track, Smoothing the Ride: Research Data Management at TU Wien. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16987539, opens an external URL in a new window
Contact
TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
Favoritenstraße 16 (top floor)
1040 Vienna