The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) initiative hosted the EOSC Symposium in Berlin this year. As an initiative of the European Union, the EOSC aims to foster Europe-wide progress in the field of open and digital science. The focus is on establishing a system that enables and simplifies the search for and the access to data and services for research and innovation in Europe. Therefore, supporting researchers in storing, analyzing and reusing FAIR research data and results is the main goal.

The three-day event, which took place from October 21st to 23rd in Berlin under the patronage of the German Federal Minister of Education and Research, Bettina Stark-Watzinger, attracted over 450 participants on-site and a further 1000 registered online. The program consisted of 26 sessions with over 130 speakers and offered a mixture of presentations, interactive sessions, panel discussions, a World Café and many networking opportunities.

On the second day of the conference, an unconference session titled “Data competencies: Training, education, qualification for researchers and data stewards” was organized by the NFDI-Section EduTrain, NFDI4Health and DALIA. The unconference was introduced with short presentations given by Jens Dierkes and Jochen Ortmeyer, in which the German National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), NFDI4Health, NFDI4Chem, the Section EduTrain, DALIA and other European initiatives were introduced. These presentations set the stage for the subsequent panel discussion, which aimed at illuminating various points of debate from different perspectives. Moderated by Ulrich Sax, Jochen Ortmeyer, Konrad Förstner (ZB MED), Celia van Gelder (Health-RI), and Aneta Pazik-Aybar (National Science Center Poland) participated in the discussion on the future of data literacy in science. Gaps in the teaching and training of research data management skills were highlighted, the role of the data steward was discussed and the challenges in terms of scalability of research data management training and institutional hurdles were explained.

The panel agrees that it is essential to teach basic data management skills from the outset and across all levels of education. They also concur that greater interdisciplinary cooperation and more intensive use and reuse of existing resources and offerings are necessary.

This unconference marked an important milestone in international networking for DALIA - connecting our efforts to the European stage. Therefore, we would like to thank the organisers for the opportunity of this unconference session and for three days full of productive discussions, fruitful exchange and interesting presentations.