Co-creating a sustainable research environment: The OEduverse project - MCAA Magazine February 2023

The career paths and the personal obstacles we face together are as diverse as the stories that make us the researchers we are. With the right training space and the right tools, we can enrich our stories and take ownership of our individual research environment. Together with the MCAA, this training space became a reality with the OEduverse summer school training programme.

Researchers can face several challenges during their careers. Some of those challenges stem from the lack of training in important topics such as mental health awareness and science communication. Since 2019, the OEduverse project - funded within the Erasmus+ strategic partnership programme - has been training Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) on those essential skills. The project is built on three central pillars: mental wellbeing, open science, and science communication.

Under the coordination of the University of Siegen, and in partnership with the Technische Informationsbibliothek, SciLink, Trinity College Dublin’s Student Counseling Center, the Marie Curie Alumni Association (MCAA), SPACE, and the steady support of Eurodoc, the OEduverse project has integrated the right expertise to develop essential tools to help ESRs to succeed in their personal research roadmap.

The project trained Europe’s newest researchers on their mental wellbeing, both at the personal level and within their professional circles. With the different training sessions held during the last years, participants are now better equipped to look within themselves and their work environments, to deal with stressful situations and to maintain professional relationships. Since stress is constant throughout ESRs’ careers, the project not only created awareness of mental wellbeing issues, but also provided researchers with new tools to conduct more impactful research, and be more effective in their research teams.

New tools to conduct more impactful research

Open Science is a central concept to the advancement of science in Europe through the 21st century. Increasingly, researchers need to be experts in a number of different aspects of open research, like research management or research evaluation, and be more than proficient in the various technological tools required for conducting research in open environments. The OEduverse project educated ESRs on practical research management skills, research ethics and evaluation techniques, creating their own Open Science toolbox.

As a researcher in a constantly changing world, it is vitally important to be able to share your science with the wider public, and for that, to develop creativity, critical thinking and communication as essential skills.

Within OEduverse, researchers were trained to explore the methodology of immersive storytelling, allowing them to unearth their personal science narrative and to use that to communicate their research more effectively to wider audiences and to each other. The training focused on empowerment and ownership of a sustainable career in research, giving participants more confidence in their presentation skills, as they were able to combine the newly mastered skills and knowledge into personalized research paths to finally get a handle on their research environment.

The project is continuously promoting activities where ESRs can benefit and acquire the necessary skills for their career. The center of the project were its summer and winter schools. With a capacity of 60+ participants over three summer schools and from all different European countries, researchers had the chance to work out their personal research roadmap and take ownership of their research vision. They acquired valuable tools to put this training into action along the envisioned research roadmap. Although the project timeline has now reached an end, the training package developed by this strategic partnership will continuously be used for future training, and offered on SciLink. Furthermore, the end of 2022 saw the release of an open, fully free train the trainer handbook, to organize your personal summer school, following the OEduverse framework.

As a partner, the MCAA was deeply involved in the organization of the schools, webinars and outreach events, as well as content creation for communication and dissemination. The OEduverse project not only provides more sustainable career prospects for the researchers, but also offers the development of transferable skills with training in mental wellbeing, open science and science communication.

Ana R. Santa-Maria
MCAA member
University of Harvard, USA
anaraquel.santamaria@hotmail.com
ORCID 0000-0003-3505-5477

Christian Weber
Chair, MCAA Research Funding
working group
University of Siegen, Germany,
christian.weber@uni-siegen.de
ORCID 0000-0001-6606-5577