21st of March 2025 – Aula Blu, Rettorato UniTo
On the 21st of March, 2025 the Launch Event of the Open Science Community Torino (OSCT) took place in a crowded Blue Room at the Rettorato of the University of Torino (UniTo). More than 50 participants attended the event, including researchers, PhD students and professors.
The OSCT was born from an idea of a group of young researchers from the University of Torino, Luca Visentin, Ilaria Stura, Evdokia Tema and Elena Giglia. They participated in the CUAP course for Data Stewardship organized by UniTo, and share a common vision for open, ethical, and transparent research. The OSCT is the first Italian Open Science community, and is a member of the International Network of Open Science & Scholarship Communities (INOSC).
The OSCT is an open community that aims to bring together researchers, students, technical staff and citizen scientists from in and around Torino, all united in the common goal of promoting Open Science in their Institutions.
Elena Giglia, opened the event by giving an introduction to the philosophy of Open Science, showcasing its benefits and the main challenges it faces. Next, Luca Visentin, one of the coordinators of the OSCT, presented the OSCT, explaining how this initiative was born, its objectives, and how to get involved, also describing the tools created to support communication among members.
The community has four main objectives:
- Organize Open Science initiatives in Turin, in collaboration with universities and other institutions;
- Support researchers in the practice of Open Science through the exchange of best practices, strategies and resources;
- Connect researchers interested in Open Science with a peer-to-peer network;
- Train on methods and strategies to integrate Open Science into daily research practice.
It was emphasized that OSCT is not a service, but a community of people, united by a shared desire to improve skills and knowledge, exchange ideas and experiences, and actively contribute to building a more open scientific culture.
Next, Mauro Paschetta for the Politecnico di Torino (PoliTo), Fabrizio Fossati for the Università del Piemonte Orientale (UPO), Emanuela Secinaro and Federico Ferrarese Lupi for the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM) presented the Open Science efforts in their respective Institutions. They also discussed the challenges they face in their respective fields.
The audience actively participated in the event through a Mentimeter questionnaire, and this was one of the most interesting and fun parts of the event. 50 participants answered the proposed questions. Of these 50, the vast majority were from UniTo (41), but also INRiM (3), PoliTo (2), UPO (1) and Istituto di Ricerca per la Crescita Clinica (IRCC) (1).
Surprisingly, more than half of participants (26, 52%) were from the biomedical area, 8 had a chemistry or pharmaceutical background, 3 from Historical studies, 2 from Law studies. The remaining participants were from many fields: agronomics, engineering, computer science and other hard sciences. There were no participants from the departments of Human Studies, Philosophy or Economy.
Most participants were doctoral students or researchers (23 in total), but several full professors (7), assistant professors (5) and administrative (9) and research technicians (3) were in the audience, too.
As expected, participants felt prepared to publish their research in open access (OA, median of 4 out of 5 points) and deposit their articles in OA repositories (3/5). The audience was also informed about FAIR principles (3/5) and Open Peer Review (2.5/5), but pre registration of studies (1/5), preprints and Citizen Science (2/5) were less known topics. There is a significant drop between reported knowledge of a topic and its application in practice (p<0.01) for all areas with the exception of OA repository usage (p>0.05), possibly because these practices are nowadays widely adopted by the scientific community and rewarded by institutions.
The most known Open Science platform is Zenodo (24, 54.5%), followed by Sherpa Romeo (10, 22.7%). UniTo’s resources are basically unknown (www.oa.unito.it: 3, its intranet pages: 2), as well as the European initiatives and portals (COARA: 3, EOSC: 1).
We used freeform comments to ask participants about their difficulties in implementing Open Science. Most felt that the largest difficulty was the lack of knowledge (29), followed by a lack of dedicated support staff (16), lack of formal evaluation rewards (8) and of infrastructures (5). Some report the difficulty of introducing OS to their colleagues or external partners (6), having experienced resistance to OS in the past.
It is interesting to notice how these figures are reversed when participants are asked what their institutions are missing when supporting them in Open Science. The first answer is not education or training, but specific support staff (16), recognition of OS work (12), new infrastructure (10) and only then OS training (9). These responses suggest that for those interested in Open Science, the priority is not necessarily acquiring more knowledge, but rather having collaborators, support staff, and adequate structures to help them implement open practices in their day-to-day research.
This trend is also reflected in participants’ expectations for the OSCT: the majority (26) expressed the wish that it becomes a space for networking, mutual support, and collaboration among Open Science advocates. Secondly, they would like to organise or promote OS courses (17) at every level (masters, PhDs, for technicians and researchers proper), or thematic workshops on case studies (14).
Finally, more than half of the participants indicated e-mails as their preferred communication method, followed by Whatsapp (14), Discord (13) or Telegram (9). The OSCT will therefore start a mailing list, and the Discord Channel will remain open (https://discord.gg/JgTbFJGx).
The event ended with an Open Science Cafe’, an informal event where participants were encouraged to exchange ideas and comments on OSCT and have an open discussion with the organizers about key Open Science topics. The topic of Data Stewardship and the emerging figure of Data Steward was particularly popular among the audience.
In conclusion, the OSCT was warmly welcomed. Our hope is that this community will become a reference point for the Open Science efforts in and around Turin, where everyone can find space to offer and receive support, exchange advice, and build new collaborations, all in the true spirit of Open.
A sincere thank you to everyone who joined us in the launch event and that made this first step possible.
To join the Open Science Community Torino, go to https://osc-international.com/osc-torino/
