The festival
The Open Science Festival is a concept from the Netherlands, where the event has been held regularly since 2021. Three years ago, the TIB and Leibniz University Hannover jointly organised the first Open Science Festival in the German-speaking world. Others followed in Cologne, Mainz – and now in Vienna.
The Open Science Festival 2025 had an international line-up, both in terms of speakers and guests, and the programme was very varied, offering a wide range of opportunities for information, discussion, competition, and networking. The event opened with an entertaining and thought-provoking journey behind the scenes of science with Florian Aigner (TU Wien).
Other topics included the importance of open science and citizen science for society and research, as well as the great opportunities offered by AI-ready research data. On the other side, the dark side of Open Science was also discussed in a lively panel discussion.
The essential content and results of selected sessions were recorded synchronously in graphic form by graphic designer Lana Lauren in her usual impressive manner. They will soon be available, along with the other contributions, in the festival community on Zenodo.
Our contributions
Livia Beck from the Center for RDM and Birgit Söser from TU Graz presented a poster on the initial results of a survey conducted as part of the Shared RDM project, opens an external URL in a new window on the use of data stewards at Austrian universities. Posters on the partner project ARI&Snet, the overarching Cluster Forschungsdaten and the EU project OSTrails were also on display at the exhibition.
Barbara Sánchez participated as a panellist in a panel discussion organised in cooperation with Open Science Austria, opens an external URL in a new window (OSA), which highlighted the strategies, challenges, and opportunities of Open Science policies. Past infrastructure and digitisation calls were reflected upon, and considerations for possible future joint initiatives were made. In the same context, job profiles such as data stewards, research managers and infrastructure managers, as well as their distinctions, were also discussed.
Further information
- Website of the Open Science Festival 2025: https://osfestival2025.univie.ac.at/
- Festival materials in Zenodo: https://zenodo.org/communities/osf2022de/
The next Open Science Festival in the GSA region will take place in Bamberg in September 2027.
Contact
TU Wien
Center for Research Data Management
Favoritenstraße 16 (top floor)
1040 Vienna