Exciting developments from our Project Group Enriching Metadata! As they conclude their project, they've published a report on Dataset Metadata in the Flemish Research Landscape. In this initiative, the group focused on optimizing process flows in Flemish Research Performing Organisations, aiming for a more integrated and lean approach to gathering and publishing (meta)data. Find the report and their Proof of concept below! 

Highlights:

After employing questionnaires, interviews, and landscape analysis, they distilled their findings into 10 recommendations, with a focus on investigating the following four:

1. RPOs should make greater use of the regional research data (FRIS) to pull in, validate, and enrich metadata, reducing administrative investments in metadata registration and publishing.

2. RPOs should explore opportunities to build out integrations with external repositories and aggregators to ingest dataset metadata from affiliated researchers.

3. RPOs should explore the opportunities of premium ORCID integration.

4. Adjusting the status of certain metadata fields in the FOSB application profile from 'Mandatory' to 'Recommended' or 'Optional' would lessen the workload. This change aims to streamline the submission of dataset metadata to FRIS and encourages organizations to provide comprehensive metadata for Open Science KPI calculation.

Find the full report and GitHub repository here!

Curious about the findings? Access the complete version on our Zenodo community: Dataset Metadata in the Flemish Research Landscape. (zenodo.org). This report marks the beginning of efforts to further streamline and collaborate in Flanders to gather and publish (meta)data more efficiently.

On top of that, the project group coded a proof of concept to search commonly-used general repositories for datasets and software associated with a specific institution. This code can be found on our public available GitHub repository: Flemish-Research-Data-Network/institutional-dataset-finder (github.com)

A special thanks to all project group members (Dieuwertje Bloemen, Kevin Leonard, Werner Brebels, Tom Wuyts, Pascale Dengis, and Marc Portier), the Project group Chairs (Evy Neyens and Evelien D’Hollander), and our Working group Chair (Bart Dooms) for their efforts in making this project a success!