Five new projects on Open Science granted at USI

swissuniversities, the association of Swiss universities, has recently approved new projects in the field of Open Research Data (ORD) and Open Access (OA). Five of these projects are led by or involve USI researchers.

For the Academy of Architecture, Dr Elena Chestnova was awarded two projects as project leader, both in collaboration with the universities of Zurich and Bern. The first project, "Semantic text publishing as open research data for a broader audience," aims to expand an existing semantic data model for scholarly text. The project addresses persistent challenges in digital scholarly editing and advances FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data practices in the humanities. The second project by Dr Chestnova, "Re-Use Standards for Editions Data with Application Programming Interfaces", aims to enhance the re-use of digital scholarly editions data by facilitating machine-readable access through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

A collaboration between Prof. Katharina Lobinger and Dr Anna Picco-Schwendener from the Faculty of Communication, Culture and Society and eLab led to a cross-dimensional project titled "Open Data, Shared Standards: Promoting Adeguate Open Data Practices in Visual Social Research". In the past months, the team has developed a Code of Conduct for Open Data practices in visual social research. With the recently funded project, they plan to promote the use of said Code of Conduct and build a strong community of researchers in visual social research who follow these best practices.

Dr Anna Picco-Schwendener also participated in two additional projects. The first project, led by the University of Zurich, is titled "ORD Practices for Language Data across Disciplines" and addresses the need for targeted skills and knowledge required to manage language datasets across diverse research disciplines, such as medicine, history, theology, business communication, translation and interpretation, and language education. The second project is in the field of OA and is led by the University of Basel: the project "Open Access Strategies for Arts and Music" will offer an overview of the current situation in OA publishing in the arts to examine the challenges and identify practical solutions regarding relevant OA formats and practices.

The total funding awarded by swissuniversities to USI is 109,000 CHF. Details of the approved projects are available on the USI page dedicated to Open Research Data.

At the national level, swissuniversities is at the forefront of promoting the development and application of Open Science (OS) practices across Swiss higher education institutions. OS encompasses ORD and OA with the aim of making research data and scientific publications freely available for anyone to access, use, and share.

ORD call for projects at USI

USI is doing its part in promoting OS via annual call for projects dedicated to ORD. The third ORD call for projects is open from now until Monday, 3 November 2025.

Eligible USI researchers are invited to submit projects to develop competencies and resources (best practices, tools, platforms, events, initiatives, etc.) related to ORD.

For any questions regarding ORD calls and practices and to get support with your data management, please contact Dr Igor Sarman, Research Data Manager, [email protected].