Training events

This VIRGO Winter School is organised in the framework of the EOSC-hub H2020 project.

The target audience for this school is VIRGO members, postdocs, and senior researchers interested to improve their skills on data management tools and high-level solutions for supporting the VIRGO experiment.

Hands-on sessions will follow each theoretical talk, allowing to practice what has been presented.

IT Service Management is a discipline that helps provide services with a focus on customer needs and in a professional manner. It is widely used in the commercial and public sectors to manage IT services of all types, but current solutions are very heavyweight with high barriers to entry.

FitSM is an open, lightweight standard for professionally managing services. It brings order and traceability to a complex area and provides simple, practical support in getting started with ITSM. FitSM training and certification provide crucial help in delivering services and improving their management. It provides a common conceptual and process model, sets out straightforward and realistic requirements and links them to supporting materials.

FitSM is the reference framework being used in both EOSC-hub and EOSCpilot projects, among other research infrastructures as well. Through FitSM, the EOSC-hub project aims at conducting effective IT service management in a federated environment and achieving a baseline level of ITSM that can act in support of ‘management interoperability’ in federated environments where disparate organisations must cooperate to manage services. 

In addition, participants have an opportunity to receive a formal certification backed by certification authority ICO-Cert for anyone successfully passing the exam (20 multiple choice questions, 13 required to pass). Both the costs of the training and the exam is covered and offered by the EOSC-hub project for free.

The training is co-located with the DI4R Conference taking place on Friday 12 October, ensuring no overlap with the main programme.

This is one-day Foundation level course provides an agnostic introduction to the basic IT service management concepts and terms, outlines the purpose and structure of FitSM standards and their relationship to other standards, and details the formal requirements defined within it.

Background
The Open Science paradigm strongly contributes towards lifting the barriers that restrict access and re-use of research data. Aligned with the paradigm, funders and agencies, at European and national level, increasingly promote the adoption of strategies of FAIR and open research data. Such strategies, covering all datasets utilised or generated in the course of a research project, are embodied in the Data Management Plan (DMP).

Why are DMPs important ?
 Data Management Plans are important for individual researchers, community or institutional data managers and fundholders. Most H2020 proposals now require a DMP as specified in Article 29.3 of the Grant Agreement, and many countries also require this for nationally funded research. The aim of a DMP is to: - engage researchers to plan sustainable, result-oriented and cost-effective research strategies during and beyond the project lifetime, - enable research communities to discover and utilise invaluable, trustworthy data and, - allow funders assess their strategy and actions in a multitude of directions. When applicable, open access to the data, complemented with effective citation mechanism, guarantees visibility of the scientific results, for the benefit of the researcher, of the scientific community and of the society in its whole.