Silvia Wissel from the German GO FAIR office attended the Open Science FAIR. Here she is sharing her impressions with you:

The spirit of the Open Science FAIR was clear: there is just one way and that is towards Open Science. The FAIR data principles are alive in academic as well as industrial research. About 400 participants presented and discussed topics related to Open Science from 17-19 September 2019 in the wonderful city of Porto.

GO FAIR and its Implementation Networks (INs) INs were well represented and very active at the OSFair2019. Both the Discovery IN and the CO-OPERAS IN held workshop sessions: participants brought their discovery use cases to the Discovery IN, an inspiring interactive session chaired by Peter Kraker. Their results will become available in January and are already now taken up by the FAIRsFAIR project. The CO-OPERAS IN engaged the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) community in defining FAIR data in their discipline. It was great to see an active, growing SSH community at the conference working towards a FAIR ecosystem.

The poster session with its one-minute-madness had a large audience: GO Inter, presented by Peter Mutschke, had the chance to gain new connections. GO FAIR BRAZIL and the FAIR Funder study presented their work, and the GFISCO gave an overview about the synergies between the INs.

Many sessions of the conference were related to the GO TRAIN activities: training and career paths for data stewards, how to define learning objectives, how to make training material FAIR and what do we expect from the EOSC? Some countries are very far progressed; many lessons could be learned from the Netherlands, the UK and Germany.

A compliment to the hosts for the programme which provided a good chance to exchange the variety of ongoing work to achieve synergies. Now we should put this into practice.